WOLFEN (1981)
Dir. Michael Wadleigh
1981 was the year of the wolf, unleashing on cinemas both An American Werewolf in London and The Howling as well as Michael Wadleigh’s captivating Wolfen, the director’s first and final non-documentary feature. Albert Finney plays troubled NYC detective Dewey Wilson investigating a series of gory kills, beginning with the mutilation-murder of a real-estate tycoon and his wife. Big Money of course has plenty of enemies, and possibly connected is a militant Native American activist, Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos). But this crime-scene suggests some hairier happening.
Eschewing the sexual subtexts of its contemporaries, Wolfen instead gestures to an ancient and unknowable animal world never quite vanquished. Like much animal horror, Wolfen imagines the creature’s point of view as it stalks its human prey; yet these shots are used so extensively that the technique threatens to destabilize familiar human points of view associated with the order and normality Wilson seeks to restore. The resulting impression is that this threat is not merely some aberration of civilized life to be corrected by good policing, but a rival reality—ever-present and always waiting for the inevitable demise of western “progress.”
This theme is hauntingly imbued in images of industrial and residential dilapidation—urban rubble through which the wolves stalk their prey. As Wilson tracks his targets, a tingling, stealthy score by James Horner accents (and never smothers) the film’s shivery atmosphere. A film as dark, graceful and bewitching as its elusive antagonists. 5 / 5
It's all done with mirrors 