The Wolfen Are Hungry!

Buy it here!

A rich developer in New York City, with a prominent office park being planned to go up in the Bronx very shortly, gets horrifically murdered one early morning in Battery Park. His bodyguard and woman get slaughtered, too. The attack is so savage, it looks like an animal did it. Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is called in on the case because he is an odd duck and he’s good with the weird cases. He begins his investigation and the authorities are looking to place blame on a group of militants calling themselves Gotterdammerung. Dewey is on another track. Together with a sympathetic M.E. named Whittington (Gregory Hines) and his newly-assigned partner Rebecca (Diane Venora), they investigate another, more mystical cause. Dewey suspects a former Native American felon, Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos). More bodies turn up, these of homeless derelicts, each mutilated in a similar way. Wolf hairs are found on the bodies. And all at once, something that seems fairly routine becomes something implausible: is a pack of supernatural wolves living in the Bronx, and feeding off the indigent population? And if so, why attack the rich man and kill him? To get to the bottom of this mystery, Dewey will have to go to places he never thought existed, and search his soul for his own complicity.

There can't be werewolves in the Bronx, can there?

Wolfen is a very loose adaptation of the novel by Whitley Strieber, and when I say very loose, I mean that it takes the concept of wolves in New York City, some character names, a murder investigation, and then does its own thing with them. This is about as different as you can get, and as a big fan of the novel, this really bothered me on first viewing. But over the years, my fondness for this film has grown until I like it now as much as I do the novel. It’s a horror movie, oh yes, but a kind of arty one. The film has a deeply spiritual resonance, condemning the idea that man has separated himself from nature and thus lost his connection with life itself. The wolfen are never defined; are they just a pack of wolves? Are they gods? Are they shape-shifters? All we know is that they are older than man and will do anything to protect their hunting grounds. Man has driven them from the forests and into the cities and they will survive at any cost. One unique aspect to this movie is that our protagonist does not defeat the wolves, but instead comes to an uneasy understanding with them. There is no defeat, only acceptance. And while that might not be satisfactory in a visceral sense, it will echo with you for days and weeks to come. The acting is fantastic in this, every person turning in a heck of a job, with Finney owning the spotlight, of course, but all those around him are up to the challenge. The direction is crisp. I love the POV shots of the wolfen, the tracking camera movement, and the big, still compositions that show the juxtaposition of the decaying Bronx of the early 80s with the opulent madness of Manhattan. And that soundtrack! At once majestic and primal, I would love to own it.

...oh yes there can be...

Wolfen came out the same year as big-time werewolf flicks American Werewolf in London and The Howling and got lost in the shuffle. There’s no wild transformations here; they use dogs in the place of the wolves, but it works. The Wolfen isn’t your typical werewolf film. It doesn’t try to be. It’s instead a spiritual exploration of humankind and its place in the natural world, wrapped up in a horror mystery that never flags when it comes to suspense and terror. A true original, I urge you to seek this out if you like a little mysticism with your horror.

★★★★