Wolfen
by Michael Wadleigh
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DVD details
Actor: Albert Finney, Dick O'Neill, Edward James Olmos, Gregory Hines, Tom NoonanDirector: Michael Wadleigh
Brand: FINNEY,ALBERT
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Japanese (Subtitled); Georgian (Subtitled); Chinese (Subtitled); Thai (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; French (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 115 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-08-13
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
DVD Reviews of Wolfen
DVD Review: A Good Film That Could Have Been Great If It Had Not Got Sidetracked With Agendas
Summary: 3 Stars
The Wolfen is produced, shot, and acted well, and it's based on an excellent, intense novel - so why is it only good but not great? Don't get me wrong, it is worth seeing, if you're a fan of mystery/creepy films, wolves, or Albert Finney, who does a great job as usual. The film starts out well with a creepy slaying of the ultra rich Van Der Veer couple and their bodyguard in a park in Manhattan. They are killed in seconds, and for no immediately apparent reason, as they were not robbed. Most of the killing is seen through a creepy killer's POV, as it were. So in comes grizzled, world-weary detective Wilson (Finney) to try to solve a crime where there's no clear murder weapon, method, or motive. He is later joined by Rebecca Neff, a psychologist who focuses in terrorism, to see if some environmental activists were responsible, since they really hated Mr. Van Der Veer. But they begin to realize there is some inhuman, unknown, ferocious group of creatures living right in the big city. Meanwhile the story pace is interrupted every once in a while to focus on a group of Native American buds, led by Edward James Olmos, who may have some involvement with what's going on.
If it seems like the Native American stuff with Olmos fits oddly with the pace and plot of the movie in the first half (like Olmos running completely naked on the beach at night and howling at the moon - I didn't need to see that), that's because none of it was in the book. The book's plot is much more straightforward than the film version, and usually with book-to-film translations, it's the opposite. But instead of streamlining the story like most movie versions would do, this one mainly alters the focus of the story and the director Michael Wadleigh throws in a lot of ecological messages and native American mumbo jumbo mythology (not their real mythology) which appear at odd moments and sidetrack the main story.
"The Howling" was another werewolf movie the same year that took a book idea and made a film version that uses the basic story as a vehicle for other issues. In The Howling film, modern psychology takes a beating, and so does the whole werewolf movie genre in general (although that part is more of a tribute). But The Howling film mostly works better than Wolfen, because it has a better pace and better effects. However, both films have endings that didn't work to me. And both films' endings are completely contrary to their respective novels. This comes from trying to tell the same story as a book but giving the characters different motivations and giving a different context to what's happening. This works for a while, but in almost all films that try to do this, no matter how accurate they may be early on, the movie story will eventually stray from the book until you reach an ending that's very different. Why? Well, in any story that's well-plotted, things happen for a certain reason, and characters do things because of certain motivations and causes and effects. If you change those motivations, reasons, and causes, but yet try to tell the same story, eventually it will diverge from the original story, because the characters wouldn't DO all the same things if the situation around them was different. This was my main complaint with the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula. Here, the way Albert Finney gets the Wolfen to stop their rampage at the very end is almost laughably contrary to the novel. If he'd tried the same stunt in the novel, they'd have ripped him to shreds.
But here the creatures are more like regular wolves and less like the "wolfen" as described in the book. In the movie, there's no mention of their opposable thumb-like claws, which allow them to open doors, windows, climb balconies, etc. Or the fact that they're much larger and somewhat different shaped than regular wolves, including more advanced faces. But then I guess that would have been hard to do at the time with the effects as they had. I also felt they showed the wolfen way too much at the end, taking away a lot of their mystique. Although another theory I've heard is that the wolf creatures were less scary in the film version on PURPOSE, so that the viewer would feel more sympathetic to them at the end. After all, there is that end shot of several of the Wolfen running happily in the snow. In the book, the author does spend a lot of time inside the minds of the Wolfen, explaining the whole story from their point of view as well, so there are some moments of sympathy, but most of the perspective given there serves to show what the Wolfen are like, what they're capable of, and just how intelligent and dangerous they are as adversaries.
The movie starts out scary, but ultimately ends up being preachy, trying to leave the viewer with a conviction that man is responsible for the behavior of (fictional) creatures like this. The book, on the other hand, is more about two humans realizing what it's like to be hunted like an animal. It is actually more the book's theme of this that seems to have inspired some of the ideas in "Predator." That movie clearly got its "infrared Predator-vision" shot ideas from similar shots in this film.
Abert Finney as Wilson I liked, and Diane Venora was all right as Becky Neff, although her character here is slightly different than who she was in the novel. The coroner, Gregory Hines, is a nice addition to the film. Edward James Olmos and his Native American buds are okay, but in the end they're mostly there to preach. The character in the film I disliked the most, especially when compared to the book, was Dr. Ferguson, who comes across here as kind of a naïve bum of a doctor. Way too sensitive, too; in one scene his eyes are tearing up while he watches video footage of wolves being chased down by helicopters in the snow. He served a real purpose in the novel, becoming one of the major characters, although even there he was too much of an idealist. But here he just is along for the ride, and not very long at that.
Overall, I'd say Wolfen is enjoyable, and at times scary, but it's not what it easily could have been with all the talent and potential. But it certainly is a unique film that has a place in "werewolf" film history.
Description of Wolfen
Finney plays a detective who is determined to find out why people disappear and their bodies turn up in the morgue in pieces.Genre: Horror
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-SEP-2005
Media Type: DVD
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