WOLFEN (1981)
(Michael Wadleigh, 1981, 115 min, 35mm)
With his sole narrative feature WOLFEN, director Michael Wadleigh (WOODSTOCK) delivered one of the most unlikely and intriguing hybrids of the Eighties: depending on your perspective, it’s either a cerebral horror film or a political thriller with uncommon levels of both gore and social conscience. After a bizarre act of violence claims the life of a prominent real estate developer, grizzled detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) follows a thread of evidence that leads from international terrorist groups to the American Indian movement to an ancient and seemingly supernatural race of elusive urban wolves. Part of a grimy cycle of late-70s, early-80s films documenting a New York in socioeconomic freefall–see also THE WARRIORS (1979), NIGHT OF THE JUGGLER (1980) and Q: THE WINGED SERPENT (1982)–WOLFEN is unique in its ambition to diagnose the city’s present rot, which it traces back to America’s original sins of genocide and displacement, and to its eternal values of greed and social Darwinism. It’s also a work of widescreen visual genius, with astonishing effects work whose influence can be felt in another of the decade’s bravura hybrids, 1987’s PREDATOR.
