American Werewolf In London, Wolf, Wolfen, Wolf Cop, And The Wolf Man

A GAGGLE OF WEREWOLF FILMS

🧜‍♀️ I started watching Wolfen early this AM, mainly because my dog colonized my side of the bed when I foolishly got up to use the bathroom. Going back to bed was not an option unless I was willing to wake up my wife. I was not.

Grudgingly, I moved my base camp to the couch in the room with the TV. I had the energy for about a half hour of this film, but that was long enough to remind me that it’s got Gregory Hines in a nice performance as an offbeat coroner, and Albert Finney as the detective trying to work out how and why homicide victims are being slashed and torn apart without the use of knives. The scenes with Finney and his boss, played by Dick O’Neill, give us a good hard look at the important difference between craggy and jowly.

Wikipedia reminded me that the plot involves American Indians using supernatural wolves to fight back against the forces of white corporate environmental destruction, and some Weathermen-like terrorists providing a red herring so the police department doesn’t have to tell the public that a pack of Indians (and wolves) were behind the grisly murders.

There’s no consensus about whether this is even really a werewolf film; in some cineaste circles, a distinction is made between werewolves and “shape-shifters.” The film itself is a bit of a shape-shifter, bringing the 1970s gritty-but-human cop movie aesthetic into the 1980s world of cold grey machinelike film atmosphere.

I like it when familiar horror movie territory gets refreshed, and I recommend this underrated film, especially if you’re a Finney fan. Dustin Hoffman lobbied hard for the role, evidently, but no dice. Director Wadleigh wanted Finney, so he got him, and then he shot most of the movie, and then HE got fired. It’s all too much for me to process on a single cup of coffee, but the bottom line is that whatever this movie is, it didn’t deserve to be ignored. Who could have guessed that three Hollywood werewolf movies would all be released around the same time? Sorry, I mean two werewolf movies and one shape-shifter movie.

🧜‍♀️ The makers of Wolf Cop had a story to tell. As you might imagine from the title, it was a story about a man who was both wolf and cop. To me, this story got told, and told exactly the right way. It began at the beginning, and moved forward until it arrived at the end. Then it ended, and you could hardly fault it for that. What choice did it have? All things must end, sooner or later. In the case of Wolf Cop, it was sooner.

If you haven’t seen it, I’ll break it down for you. It’s not about a wolf who becomes a cop; if you think for a minute, you’ll spot the reason why that story wouldn’t make any sense. Even in a community where the standards for law enforcement hires are notoriously lax, they would not give a badge and gun to a wolf; I’m not convinced law enforcement weeds out all the traits they ought to weed out, but (to their credit) they do draw the line at creatures without opposable thumbs.

Films like this one are difficult to evaluate. It functions pretty well as the rare horror comedy that wasn’t designed exclusively to mock the form; critics tend to dismiss this sort of thing as beneath them. It’s not beneath me, though. I know how hard it is to combine likable leads with absurd violence and action, while avoiding the smarm that ruins virtually all “satire” these days. I have a real, and perhaps unhealthy, affection for this movie. To me, a plot where a guy who’s more alcoholic than cop is turned into a werewolf and then becomes a better law enforcement officer— while continuing to drink heavily— is no more contrived than Don Quixote, and arguably less contrived than Atlas Shrugged.

🧜‍♀️ I’ve wondered for years why Mike Nichols came to direct a werewolf movie. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m still not sure, but Wolf does turn out to have its moments.

Werewolf films usually follow the pattern established in the 1941 Universal picture with Lon Chaney: a guy meets a girl right around the time he’s bitten by a werewolf. Somehow, the women in the early stages of these were-lationships never suggest “slowing things down”; just once, I’d like to see a werewolf ghosted.

Nichols seems most engaged during the part of the film where Nicholson, a big wheel in New York publishing, has yet to go on any rampages of bloody mayhem. Pre-mayhem, his injection of big werewolf energy means he stops letting his sinister boss Christopher Plummer push him around, and he stops ignoring the evidence that his wife is cheating on him with his young protégée. He also starts editing books much faster than ever before.

It’s not clear from what we see on screen that his editing is actually improving these novels in any way; I would have liked more material on the editing process, but you know how that goes. In a Hollywood movie, a book editor is only interesting when he’s either turning into a wolf, or having sex with Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nichols hedges his bets by giving us both.

While I can’t recommend Wolf to people who demand that a movie be good all the way through, I did enjoy the best parts enough to get me through the worst parts.

Good: while this is not a comedy, Nichols couldn’t resist putting in a few comic touches. We get a pre-fame David Schwimmer as a Schwimmer-ish cop, and a post-fame Elaine May does a funny voiceover as the woman handling Nicholson’s wake-up call. Delightfully, it sounds like the ridiculous phone call characters she used to do with Nichols. I wish I could get wake-up calls from Elaine May.

Not so good: the embarrassing moments where special effects make it possible for Nicholson to leap through the air. This happens MANY times, especially for a Nichols film. I don’t recall Liz Taylor ever leaping over a concrete divider in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf.

Good: James Spader’s weird dialogue when he is going through the early stages of werewolfism.

Not so good: Spader after he’s completely turned into a werewolf. I find that Spader loses me when he travels too far from his typical fashion plate douche character. I need my Spader performances to involve feathered hair; it anchors him for me. When he grows fangs, and his hair goes from feathered to lycanthropic, it just feels like gilding the lily.

Good: David Hyde-Pierce, as one of the book editors.

Not so good: he only gets slightly more screen time than Schwimmer.

Good: the scene where Nicholson meets with a super-old Indian professor, who schools him on what kinds of things happen when you get bitten by a werewolf. Maybe I’m just a sucker for these scenes— only possible in a fantasy film— where qualified experts talk, and people sit there hanging on every word.

Not so good: soon after this scene, the werewolf things start happening, and the movie slowly nosedives.

🧜‍♀️ Sadly, The Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., isn’t such a good movie, and I can’t recommend unless you’re a big fan of the Universal horror cycle. I, of course, am a big fan of all those pictures, and for the fan there’s a lot to enjoy in this one. Claude Rains is always great, Bela Lugosi has one of his better bit roles, and this is pretty much THE Maria Ouspenskaya movie. If you get that last joke, you’ve probably already seen the film.

If you’re interested in early horror movies, see Bride of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man before you give this one an hour of your time.

🧜‍♀️ If you see only one of the films I’m talking about today, make it American Werewolf In London.

This movie is the best horror comedy I can think of; it’s a perfect blend of horror, romance, drama, and comic scenes. How John Landis, a director I don’t usually love, managed to calibrate all these elements this well, I couldn’t say. But calibrate them he did, and his name ought to be spoken with some reverence as a result.

Rick Baker’s makeup and practical effects help a lot, of course. The scenes with the increasingly deteriorated Griffin Dunne visiting from the afterlife are the best reason to see this film, and they still deliver today. And Jenny Agutter is somehow a more believable werewolf’s girlfriend than way-more-famous Michelle Pfeiffer (making a game effort) or Evelyn Ankers (no comment), in Wolf and The Wolf Man. Jenny has a sex scene with David Naughton that’s both tasteful and very sexy. It’s not as good as the classic scene with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Don’t Look Now, but it’s effectively edited in a similar way. Apparently Landis was pressured to cut the scene down, and he did, but it still works.

Look fast for the great Rik Mayall in the tavern scene, where all the British yokels give Naughton and Dunne the cold shoulder right before sending them back out to the werewolf-infested moors. Rik isn’t given much to work with, but if you watch it a few times you can see that his expressions have a lot to do with why the scene is so memorable.