Cover Art

Credits

Director: Michael Wadleigh Starring: Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Edward James Olmos, Gregory Hines, Tom Noonan, Dick O'Neill, Dehl Berti, Peter Michael Goetz, Sam Gray, Ralph Bell, Max M. Brown, Anne Marie Pohtamo, Sarah Felder Screenplay: David Eyre, Michael Wadleigh Tagline: Their hunting ground - New York City. Their prey - the people Country: USA

A big-shot property developer is murdered in New York's Battery Park and burnt out NYPD detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) lands the case, which it transpires is linked to a bizarre series of violent murders across several cities over many years where it appears that the victims were killed by animals. Soon he's teamed up with a psychologist (Diane Venora) and an unorthodox coroner (Gregory Hines - sporting an eye-popping 'Seventies' afro, guaranteed to date the movie) and aided by a bunch of local American Indians, primary amongst their number being Edward James Olmos, and an oddball zoo curator, Tom Noonan. In his pursuit he learns of what might or might not be simply an Indian legend about wolf spirits, Wilson begins to learn about a "far older, more 'complete' being" who may be responsible for the slayings. These are "Wolfen", an intelligent wolf-breed who co-existed harmoniously with the native (Indian) Americans until driven underground by the coming of the white man and the attendant slaughter followed by an increasing urban sprawl. Now the "Wolfen" live underground in all the big American cities, amongst the vast square miles of abandoned tenement blocks, living off mankind's "garbage" - derelicts, the homeless, the abandoned - waste products, the refuge of today's ruthless society.

What set's Wolfen apart from all its werewolf picture cohorts is the allegorical tale at its centre, the fate of the "Wolfen", once the masters of their eminent domain, now reduced to living in squalor as the victims of the white-man's urban decay, is paralleled with that of the Native American (Indian), driven out and down in a Caucasian dominated society - and much of this intuitive element is down to a clever script by David Eyre and Woodstock director Michael Wadleigh. The linear plotting contains much that is relatively standard fare, police procedural elements, the cliché 'growing attraction/relationship' between male and female lead, and the by now de-rigueur 'unorthodox coroner' who demonstrates complete indifference to the more ghoulish or even the more reverential aspects of his job, but in drawing in the deeper observations on show, Wolfen is elevated beyond the mere status of 'supernatural/creature-feature thriller. Oddly enough, when director Michael Wadleigh delivered his first cut of Wolfen to the execs at Warner Brothers back in 1981, they took one look and recoiled in horror; "Oh My God(!)-A horror movie with a social conscience", and promptly unleashed a battery of editors upon it. This resulted in a version with no Indians, one with no wolves and one with no terrorists (urban terrorists also feature within the film's scenario), until commonsense prevailed and Wadleigh's original version was allowed out onto general release, whereupon it promptly went belly-up in the States, obviously containing too much in the way of taxing cerebral requirement for the average American theatre-goer to ingest at a single sitting.