Warner Bros., 1981
starring: Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Gregory Hines and Edward James Olmos
directed by: Michael Wadleigh

the plot: When a wealthy New York real estate developer and his wife are viciously slaughtered in Battery Park, detective Dewey Wilson (Finney) is dragged out of retirement to investigate. With no witnesses and few clues, Wilson first assumes that the developer’s political and business connections made him a target. Terrorism expert Rebecca Neff (Venora) is called in to assist Wilson, and the two initially operate under the assumption that a homegrown terrorist group butchered the developer. But Wilson’s friend Whittington (Hines), a coroner in the city morgue, uncovers a tantalizing clue—a single wolf hair found on the victim’s body. The investigation soon takes Wilson down strange avenues, and a meeting with an ex-con and a former member of the American Indian Movement (Olmos) convinces him that there may be a supernatural angle to the case. When another victim, this time a homeless man, turns up in the South Bronx, Wilson sets up a stakeout and comes face to face with the killers—a clan of supernatural wolves bent on protecting their territory at all costs.

why it’s good: “Wolfen” came out the same year as “The Howling” and “An American Werewolf in London,” and of the three, “Wolfen” is the most cerebral and least werewolfy. There are no awesome transformation sequences or big city werewolf hunts. Instead, there’s a lot of talk about domestic terrorism, environmental issues and some bits about the American Indian Movement. Yeah, there are some wolves in “Wolfen,” and parts of the movie are even shot in wolf-vision (a POV shot combined with thermography, kind of like the Predator’s heat-vision in “Predator”). But the wolves are really secondary to the human drama in “Wolfen,” and they mostly show up only at the end, looking both noble and menacing. Director (and Dover redident) Michael Wadleigh, whose only other directorial credit is “Woodstock,” manages to keep the film taught and suspenseful simply by throwing in a few wolf-vision shots and heavily suggesting that the wolves are out hunting Finney and company. It’s Finney who carries the film, though, grumbling and barking his way through the movie. Middle-aged and irascible, Finney seems an unlikely leading man for a horror flick, but the script (written by Wadleigh and co-writer Eric Roth) allows Finney’s character to move naturally. He makes mistakes, screws up and, most of all, actually thinks. In one scene, Wilson sits in front of a window and absently talks to himself about the murders, leading him to a revelation that sets him on the path to solving the case. That solution, though, isn’t very good. The wolves are anti-heroes, not some grizzly lycanthropes that need to be slain with a silver bullet, and the climax, in which Wilson makes peace with the wolves, does not thrill or make sense.

why you should own it: Warner Home Video’s release of “Wolfen” is completely lacking in extras. It’s worth a rent, if only for Finney’s performance, though Warner could have at least wrangled a commentary track out of author Whitley Strieber, who wrote the novel on which “Wolfen” was based, as well as a series of books about his alleged abduction by aliens.