Category: Full Moon Features

A good 13 years before American Horror Story co-creators Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy set the show’s fourth season in and around a freak show, there was 2001’s Wolf Girl, which is set in and around a freak show. Instead of Jessica Lange as a Marlene Dietrich-like entertainer, this one’s owner, Harley Dune, is played by Tim Curry, who doesn’t have to act like anyone other than himself to be convincing. His main attraction — and he knows it — is Tara the Wolf Girl (Victoria Sanchez), who suffers from hypertrichosis, but otherwise is a completely normal, reasonably well-adjusted young woman. Then Dune’s traveling anachronism rolls into a town where Tara runs afoul of a quartet of teenage bullies who have nothing better to do with their time than come up with ways to humiliate her while she’s trying to work.

It’s not a total wash, though, since she meets a shy boy named Ryan (Dov Tiefenbach) who offers to help her out since his mother (Lesley Ann Warren), a cosmetics researcher, is secretly working on an experimental depilatory serum. While Tara appreciates its effectiveness, especially when her body hair starts falling out in clumps in the shower, the side effects she keeps from Ryan — headaches, violent daydreams, aggressive behavior — are more troubling. As to why she starts to act more like an animal the less she looks like one, that’s a question for screenwriter Lori Lansens and director Thom Fitzgerald, who pad out the running time with risque sideshow acts, including two full songs performed by Grace Jones as half-man/half-woman Christoph/Christine.

Sprinkled throughout the film are passing references to recent wolf attacks, which began before Tara’s arrival, so it’s not like the townspeople can suspect her of them, as well as glimpses of the not terribly threatening-looking beast itself. There’s also a scene where Dune’s right-hand man, Fingers Finnian (Jordan Prentice, who later popped up in a memorable cameo in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges), invokes the Freak Code, thus raising the specter of Tod Browning’s Freaks. Once Tara gets a taste for revenge, though, she proves more than capable of taking care of herself.

When presented with a film like 2009’s Dark Moon Rising, it’s hard to know quite where to begin. Also known as Wolf Moon — and not to be confused with 2015’s Dark Moon Rising, which is a different movie altogether — it raises a big red flag by virtue of the fact that it has a running time in excess of two hours. In all my years of watching werewolf movies, there has only been one other that has topped two hours and that was Mike Nichols’s Wolf. (Even the director’s cut of Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman managed to come in under two hours.) In the case of Wolf, the extended running time was somewhat justified because the film doubled as a sharp character study. Dark Moon Rising, on the other hand, is stocked with shallow characters who are exactly what they appear to be on first glance and never develop beyond that. And since there are only seven characters of any note — and two of those are glorified cameos — that means they have a hell of a lot of water to tread between them.

If the opening narration is anything to go by, this is the story of a girl named Amy (Ginny Weirick), the virginal daughter of an overprotective Nevada rancher (Chris Mulkey) who falls in love with a handsome drifter named Dan (Chris Divecchio) who just so happens to be cursed to periodically turn into a hairy beast (which looks a heck of a lot like the X-Man Beast when we finally get a good look at him about a third of the way into the picture). Actually, the two of them don’t hit it off at first because he’s a total jerk to her, but then he stops being a jerk and later comes to her rescue when she naïvely accepts a ride from a stranger who attempts to rape her. It is then that Dan reveals he’s been following Amy around since the day they met, which she rightly identifies as stalker behavior, but they still go through with the standard-issue “falling in love” montage that is only slightly marred by his vision of slashing her face with a hairy paw. That’s only the beginning, though, because in the very next scene he goes full-on wolf-man, terrorizing an old couple in a truck and bothering some livestock and killing a dog before getting scared off by the shotgun-toting Crazy Louis (the part the late Sid Haig was born to play).

The next morning, Dan wakes up in the desert, clad only in torn jeans (kind of like The Hulk) and gets a ride back into town, whereupon he drives Amy out to the desert so he can spill his secret, bluntly saying, “I’m a fucking werewolf,” then chaining himself up so he can’t hurt her. He breaks the chain as soon as he changes, though (through the magic of morphing), but doesn’t harm her, which inspires them to go to a psychic to find out what the deal with him is. The psychic tells them he’s cursed (no duh) and that his father must be killed if he is to be freed from it. (She also tells them, “Goodbye. Please don’t let out the kitty,” when it’s time for them to go.) This, by the way, is the perfect time to bring up the dark, mysterious stranger (played by top-billed Max Ryan) who kills his way through several states on his way to Pahrump, Nevada. (Can’t imagine who he could be.) (Also, Pahrump, Nevada, is totally a real place that neither I nor the filmmakers made up.)

In the role of the clueless sheriff who can’t understand how a wolf could kill a horse while walking upright like a man, co-writer/director Dana Mennie cast Maria Conchita Alonso, one of six lucky cast members who are listed as co-producers in the opening credits. (I’m guessing this means they didn’t get paid up front.) The last piece of the puzzle is provided by Billy Drago as a man on the trail of Dan’s father who fills in Amy’s father and the sheriff (who once had a thing for each other, don’tcha know) on his backstory. Meanwhile, Amy’s father tries in vain to keep her and Dan apart, even pulling a gun on him at one point, but he’s happy to have the young werewolf on his side when the time comes for the final showdown with his old man. (Crazy Louis gets in on this as well, allowing Haig to let rip with lines like “Let’s go kill some shit” and “All right, you fuzzy-ass motherfucker” when he goes mano-a-mano with the big, bad wolf.) Why Dan has to walk off into the sunset after it’s all over was lost on me (after all, his father was killed, which is what I thought had to happen for his curse to be lifted), but as it’s been a decade since this came out, I don’t think we’ll be getting a Dark Moon Rising 2 (or a Wolf Moon 2, for that matter) to clarify it.

This month marks a milestone of sorts since this is my 100th Full Moon Feature for Werewolf News. To mark the occasion, I could revisit an old favorite (like An American Werewolf in London, which I covered in my very first column eight years ago) or take stock of everything I’ve seen and learned in the time I’ve been contributing to this fine site. Or I could eviscerate some half-assed werewolf movie I found streaming on Amazon Prime. Yeah, that’s more like it.

This month’s half-assed werewolf movie is Alpha Wolf, which has one up on its low-budget brethren since director Kevin VanHook has a recognizable star in Casper Van Dien (also one of the film’s producers), who has come down in the Hollywood hierarchy since his days appearing in such A-list genre fare as Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers and Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow. In Alpha Wolf, he plays Jack Lupo (not the film’s most egregious character name, but it’s close), who is introduced driving out to the proverbial cabin in the woods with his wife Virginia (Jennifer Wenger) and her dog Larry (as in Talbot). Their destination: her aunt’s cabin, which has sat vacant since her uncle was killed in the standard “two hunters get brutally slain by some shaggy, half-seen monster” prologue.

The cabin is the kind of place where there’s no cell reception and they need to fire up the generator if they want electricity. In other words, the perfect place to patch up a shaky marriage or get savaged by some hairy beast. This happens about a quarter of the way into the film, after the obligatory sex scene where Van Dien shows off more of his body than his co-star. Likewise, Jack reveals the kind of man he is when, having been bitten on the arm by the beast that just jumped through the window, he runs off (shades of the cowardly husband in Force Majeure), leaving Larry to come to Virginia’s rescue. In the process of chasing the monster off, though, Larry gets bit himself. And what do you think happens when a dog is bit by a werewolf? Have no fear. Alpha Wolf has the answer.

The film also has an answer for why everyone in the isolated rural community where it’s set behaves so strangely knowing. From Big John, owner of the general store, and his brother, Sheriff Carradine (whose names combine, Voltron-like, to form one of the werewolf actors in The Howling) to Doc Howard (who has the same surname as a certain Teen Wolf), who examines Jack’s wound and tells him “life for you is about to change,” they all know what the score is from the start.

None is more smug about it, though, than the neighborly Reed Oliver (yes, screenwriter Wes C. Caefer went and took the name of the star of The Curse of the Werewolf and just reversed it), who arrives on their doorstep after Virginia has boarded up all the windows and doors and proceeds to bend her ear about the duality of man and how Jack has been given “The Gift” when all he’s really been given is the ability to turn into a creature (“What you might call a werewolf,” he says patronizingly) that looks a lot like the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. As played by Patrick Muldoon (a fellow Starship Troopers vet), Reed is about an insufferable as they come, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody who the couple’s fuzzy visitor was. Similarly, when Virginia points out the coin jar full of silver dollars upon their arrival at the cabin, that all but guarantees they’ll be put to some use before the credits roll.

The Italian horror cycle, begun in 1957 with I Vampiri, a.k.a. Lust of the Vampire (directed by Riccardo Freda with an uncredited assist from cinematographer Mario Bava), was in full swing by the time 1961’s Lycanthropus came along. Retitled Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory when it was dubbed into English and released in the US two years later — on a double bill with the Boris Karloff vehicle Corridors of Blood — it is precisely as cheesy as you would expect a film about a wolf man terrorizing a girls’ reformatory to be. Instead of a straight-up horror film, though, what director Paolo Heusch (credited as Richard Benson) and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi (fresh off 1960’s The Vampire and the Ballerina) cooked up is more akin to a murder mystery, with reform school girl Priscilla (Barbara Lass) determined to find out who clawed her best friend to death. (Quoth Priscilla: “Mary was just assassinated. No one will convince me she was torn up by wolves.”)

Good thing for Priscilla she has no shortage of possible suspects. There’s new science teacher Dr. Olcott (Carl Schell), who arrives in a cloud of mystery; the institute’s director Swift (Curt Lowens), who knows his secret; lecherous aristocrat Sir Whiteman (Maurice Marsac), who was being blackmailed by the murder victim; Peter Lorre-ish caretaker Walter (Luciano Pigozzi), who is used to doing Whiteman’s dirty work; and creepy-looking porter Tommy (Joseph Mercier), who has little to do apart from hang around and be a creepy-looking red herring. Once you get past the low-budget trappings and the lazy plotting (the first time we get a clear look at the werewolf, it’s easy to tell which character he is), this is actually a fairly entertaining movie. If it had been made a couple of decades later, it might have even delivered on its exploitation title (à la 2006’s Werewolf in a Womens Prison), but some things are better left to the imagination.

Another month, another Full Moon Feature. This month’s selection is 1989’s Night Shadow, a film I came by in a four-movie pack with Howling IV: The Original Nightmare, Raging Sharks, and Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep. (I guess you’d call that a surf-and-wolf combo.) I knew the film couldn’t possibly live up to its cover image, which depicts a man with a howling wolf’s head and hairy shoulders who’s wearing pants that have slipped down to reveal his underwear, but a werewolf movie is a werewolf movie is a werewolf movie…

Unless, of course, that werewolf movie is Night Shadow, which sends up its first red flag during the opening credits when it reveals that it’s “based on a concept and creature designed by Mark Crowe.” Not that I have anything against Crowe and his creature design work, mind you, but if this movie got made simply because he had a werewolf suit lying around, that’s not a good enough reason. I guess it was sufficient for writer/director Randolph Cohlan, though, who killed two birds with one swipe of the claw by making Night Shadow both his directorial debut and swan song. It was also one of the last films for veteran character actor Aldo Ray (as Gene Krebelski, novelty fish product salesman), and it was the last for special effects technician Rick Scott, who got the role of a lifetime — literally — as the bearded drifter with the gnarly fingernails who (shock! horror! puzzlement!) turns out to be a werewolf. (I often wonder why low-budget movies bother “introducing” actors if they’re only going to fade back into the woodwork.)

Actually, the star of the film is Brenda Vance, who plays successful TV anchorwoman Alex Jung, who chooses to spend her vacation in her sleepy hometown and finds she’s being stalked by a real creep who seems to have some kind of a psychic connection with her — that is, when he isn’t killing old men for their pickup trucks. While she’s home, Alex checks in with her brother Tai (Stuart Quan, credited as Dane Chan), a kickboxing handyman in a half-shirt, and makes time with old flame Adam (Tom Boylan), whose job as sheriff is complicated by the vicious mutilations that get dropped into his lap. Meanwhile, Tai pulls pranks on and with his two asshole friends Dean and Bruce (Kato Kaelin — yes, that Kato Kaelin — and Orien Richman), who are marked for death when they steal the drifter’s diary out of his stinky motel room.

Now, some people who lived through the ’90s will say it’s worth tracking this movie down just to watch Kato Kaelin get a metal pipe shoved through his chest by a hairy werewolf. Let me assure you, these people are wrong. If there’s any entertainment to be wrung out of this tedious monster movie, it can be found in the performance of Jeannette Lewis as unflappable county coroner Francis Stern. Not only does she deliver the requisite werewolf movie dialogue (“All of the victims were mutilated in exactly the same way. There are definite signs of an animal attack.”) like a champ, but she also says one of the funniest lines I’ve ever heard in any werewolf movie: “The woman’s head is missing, making identification very difficult.” I tell you, that’s Academy Award material right there.

This month’s Full Moon Feature is a double since I’m covering a pair of films set in places where humans coexist with supernatural creatures. In Freaks of Nature, it’s Dillford, the “Home of the Riblet,” where humans, vampires, and zombies live side by side, with shock collars on the zombies to prevent them from chowing down on the human population and an uneasy truce keeping the humans and vampires from going at each other. Meanwhile, Slice’s Kingfisher is divided between humans and ghosts, but the town’s slogan — “A Great Place to Be Alive!” — is a real slap in the face to its 40,000 deceased residents. Of course, I wouldn’t be talking about either film if they didn’t also feature werewolves, but in both cases the hairy beasts feel like an afterthought, as if the screenwriters decided to throw in another monster at the last minute, which is pretty much when they show up in each film.

The protagonists of Freaks of Nature are high school students Dag (Nicholas Braun), whose hippie parents have long kept from him the fact that he’s a werewolf, newly turned vampire Petra (Mackenzie Davis), who gets labeled a slut for going “all the way” with one of the vamp bullies at their school, and put-upon nerd Ned (Josh Fadem), the smartest kid in school who deliberately gets himself bitten by a zombie after an uninspirational teacher shatters his dream of getting into a good college. Said teacher, who just so happens to be a vampire, also happens to be played by Keegan-Michael Key, one of a number of funny people director Robbie Pickering and screenwriter Oren Uziel don’t spend nearly enough time with.

Other grown-ups who get short shrift in Freaks of Nature are Denis Leary’s asshole riblet plant owner, Bob Odenkirk and Joan Cusack as Dag’s “understanding” parents (who give him The Talk about the changes his body is going through), and Patton Oswalt as a doomsday prepper who’s ready for the coming apocalypse — whatever kind of apocalypse it turns out to be. His decision to let Dag, Petra, and Ned into his shelter in the midst of an alien invasion predictably backfires, but at least he can take comfort in having aided the only creatures — undead or otherwise — standing between Dillford and oblivion.

There’s no alien invasion to foil in Slice, just a conspiracy by a coven of witches to open the gate to Hell located in the basement of Perfect Pizza Base, which is suffering from a shortage of delivery people thanks to the mysterious killer targeting them. Since fugitive werewolf Dax Lycander (Chance the Rapper) is spotted at the scene of each murder, Kingfisher’s mayor (Chris Parnell) is quick to attribute them to him in a series of press conferences. This isn’t too hard to swallow since Dax fled town after the Yummy Yummy Chinese Cuisine Massacre, which claimed six lives, but has returned for reasons known only to writer/director Austin Vesely. (He certainly doesn’t seem too concerned about clearing his name.) Meanwhile, the first victim’s girlfriend (Zazie Beetz) tries to get to the bottom of things since the lead detective on the case is prejudiced against werewolves and therefore eager to pin it all on Dax without any evidence.

“What kind of werewolf are you?” Dax is asked when he’s taken into custody, and the answer turns out to be the kind that needs the moon to be full to wolf out, and when he does the change in his appearance is decidedly underwhelming. (See above. That his transformation back to human form mere minutes later is accomplished with CGI only adds insult to injury.) As in Freaks of Nature, the brightest spots in Slice’s supporting cast are filled by skilled comedians like Parnell and Paul Scheer (as the owner of the cursed pizza place who’s more concerned about the losses in sales than his employees’ lives). To paper over the copious holes in his script, though, Vesely throws in tons of narration by an eager newspaper reporter (Rae Gray) whose efforts to make sense of it all are ultimately beside the point in a film with lines of dialogue like “Godspeed, you Chinese food werewolf.”

Matthew Broderick was a year away from his signature role at the time, but there are many ways in which Phillipe Gaston — the pickpocket he plays in Ladyhawke who goes by the nickname Mouse — is Ferris Bueller transported back to the Middle Ages, substituting his one-sided conversation with God for Ferris’s fourth-wall-breaking asides to the camera. Phillipe talks so much, in fact, that his nickname should have been Motormouth, but that may have been too anachronistic, even for a film with a hard-driving synth-rock soundtrack produced by Alan Parsons.

Often cited as one of Ladyhawke’s biggest flaws, its score (composed by Andrew Powell, who did the orchestral arrangements for the Alan Parsons Project) is far from the film’s only problem. For starters, it’s the kind of medieval epic where all the soldiers’ tunics look brand new (or at the very least freshly cleaned) and their swords all gleam, a marked contrast with Paul Verhoeven’s down and dirty Flesh + Blood, which second-billed Rutger Hauer starred in the very same year. Hauer, incidentally, plays the film’s lycanthrope, a knight named Navarre cursed to live as a wolf by night while Isabeau, his lady love, is a hawk by day. In her human form, she’s played by Michelle Pfeiffer, whose sudden arrival on the scene stuns Phillipe almost as much as the wolf that makes its first appearance (and kills a peasant) the first night he is traveling with Navarre. “There are strange forces at work in your life, magical things that surround you,” he tells the knight the next day, but it is a while before he finds out precisely how strange.

The second night passes without any sight of the wolf (which is no great loss because it is, after all, just a wolf), but on the third day of their journey the hawk is shot with a crossbow bolt (did I mention that Phillipe and Navarre are being pursued by a tyrannical bishop played by John Wood who has dispatched his guards to capture/kill them?) and Phillipe is sent with the wounded bird to the ruined castle of a monk (Leo McKern) who knows all about their curse (“Always together, eternally apart”) and believes he knows how to break it. Alas, there’s a great deal of wheel-spinning to be done before that can occur, stretching the running time to two full — nay, overstuffed — hours.

Since Ladyhawke arrived in the midst of the decade when in-camera transformations were all the rage (even the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” indulged in them), it can’t help but be disappointing that director Richard Donner opts for simple dissolves or cuts between flashes of lightning to change Hauer into a wolf and Pfeiffer into a hawk and back again. That’s the difference between horror and high fantasy, though. No need to make the transition seem physically painful since Navarre and Isabeau are enduring the emotional cruelty of being kept apart.

By the end of the ’70s, werewolf movies were fairly thin on the ground and very much in need of new blood (or at the very least, a novel way of transforming men into monsters). There was one throwback, however, that managed to make a killing on the drive-in circuit without ever venturing north of the Mason-Dixon Line — and without breaking new ground in any other way. Written and directed by first-timer Worth Keeter and produced by Earl Owensby, 1979’s generically titled Wolfman has a vaguely Southern Gothic atmosphere (various reference books list its setting as 1910 Georgia, but the film itself isn’t so specific on that point) and stars Owensby as Colin Glasgow, the “worldly” cousin who’s called home for the funeral of his elderly father. Seems there’s a curse on his family and Colin’s aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Clement Glasgow (Maggie Lauterer and Richard Dedmon), would much rather it fall on him than either one of them. Good thing for them that they have Satan-worshiping priest Reverend Leonard (Edward Grady) on their side.

Soon after his arrival at the estate, Colin starts having Vaseline-smeared nightmares which cause him to wake up in a cold sweat (and show off his naturally hairy chest and back). He also hooks up with old flame Lynn (Kristina Reynolds) and consults with family doctor Dr. Tate (Sid Rancer), who confirms there’s something strange going on. With all the repetitious dialogue and endless scenes of Colin riding around in his horse-drawn carriage (Owensby paid for it, so they obviously decided to shoot the hell out of it), it’s nearly an hour before he changes into the title character and goes on his first rampage which, when discovered, elicits the usual bewildered reactions from the authorities. (“It wasn’t anything human that killed them. Some kind of animal got them.” “I can’t say this looks like the work of any ordinary animal.”) It also produces the usual headlines about animal attacks, but I loved the ancillary story on the front page of the prop newspaper with the headline “CHURCH HOMECOMING DISRUPTED BY BEES.”

Without much further ado, Colin transforms a second time with the aid of quick lap-dissolves and, after chomping on his greedy relatives, is pursued by a trigger-happy posse. That doesn’t prevent him from picking a few of them off and evading capture until sunrise, when he transform back into a man. While Colin languishes in jail, Lynn and Dr. Tate confront Reverend Leonard, which immediately puts Lynn in peril (and leads to a foot chase through a cemetery over which some unmistakably modern electrical wires are strung). Will Colin escape in time to save her? And will he get to transform one last time while doing so? I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the ending of a good movie, but yes, he does both of those things.

Just as having a sizable budget is no guarantee of making a good werewolf movie, having a miniscule one doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to turn out a bad one. If you make the right creative decisions and spend what little money you have wisely — and make sure your script is good enough to compensate for any shortcomings in the effects department — it’s possible to make a werewolf movie on a shoestring that isn’t a complete embarrassment. Unfortunately, that’s precisely what Adam R. Steigert’s FANG is, which is doubly baffling because it’s not his first feature (which would be understandable), but rather his seventh (with a few shorts thrown in for bad measure).

Based in Buffalo, New York, where FANG (yes, the title is in all caps) had its premiere last October, Steigert has been pumping out low-budget genre flicks at a rapid clip for the past decade, often acting as his own cinematographer and editor in addition to his writing and directing duties, which he frequently shares with others. From the start, he’s set most of his movies in the same fictional town known variously as Metzburg, Metsburg, Metzburgh, or Metsburgh. However it’s spelled, the town figures into FANG since it’s the destination of strung-out junkie Joe (Theo Kemp) and his equally strung-out but not strung-out-looking girlfriend Chloe (Melodie Roehrig), who knows of the proverbial house “in the middle of nowhere” where they can hide out after murdering a stranger for drug money. While walking to Metz/sburg/h, Joe and Chloe encounter Chris and Shelly (Jason John Beebe and Jennie Russo), a bickering couple on their way to a wedding whose vehicle has broken down and who grudgingly tag along with them until they get to Chloe’s relatives’ house, which is when things really start going sideways for all concerned.

For starters, creepy caretaker Harold (second-billed Gregory Blair, whose character’s last name is never spoken, but is listed in the credits as Pinter, an in-joke that makes next to no sense since there’s little about his character that is Pinteresque) informs them they can’t call anyone for help because “The Crowleys don’t really believe in phones.” They do, however, believe in having every door in their house locked at all times, a plot point Steigert immediately bungles because the set of clanking keys Harold carries around are too large to fit the one door we see that has a lock, and none of the others even have keyholes. Since that’s a detail that figures heavily into the script (which Steigert wrote with his wife Kristin), that definitely should have been caught during the location scout.

After the interminable build-up, Doris and Roy Crowley (top-billed Melantha Blackthorne and “and ____ as” Patrick Mallette) arrive on the scene 23 minutes in and proceed to up the eccentricity factor significantly with their mannered performances and theatrical old-age makeup. Once they’ve thoroughly grossed out their reluctant guests during dinner and sequestered Joe in his room — which apparently leads to the basement, where he eventually finds editor Christopher Burns Jr. chained up in his underwear and being force-fed human remains — the Crowleys show their true colors and begin picking the interlopers off. Any viewers hoping to get a good look at their transformed state had better have the pause button handy, though, because they’re the “blink and you’ll miss them” kind of monsters.

Periodically, Steigert cuts away from the Crowley house to the half-assed police investigation of the opening murder, which leads the portly sheriff to consult with retired beat cop and full-time crackpot William Sanders (Michael O’Hear, reprising his role from Steigert’s sophomore feature, 2009’s Gore), who’s remarkably active for someone with stage-three cancer and three months to live. His cancer-rich blood turns out to be a better weapon against the Crowleys than silver bullets, even, although he has to be bitten by one of them for this to be discovered, and anyone who’s seen a werewolf movie before knows what that means. Oh, and did I forget to mention the part where he and Chloe go to Joe’s dealer (whose name, I shit you not, is Christmas Eve) for backup and he just happens to know a guy who knows how to make silver bullets? Yeah, FANG is that kind of movie. It’s also the kind of movie that closes with the message that two of its characters “will return in The Horrific Evil Monsters,” which is currently filming. Based on the evidence of this one, that’s more of a threat than a promise.

Released in the midst of the 1981 werewolf movie boom that yielded Full Moon High, The Howling, and An American Werewolf in London in quick succession, Wolfen is often lumped in with them in spite of the fact that its supernatural wolf creatures are emphatically not shapeshifters. The first of three Whitley Strieber books adapted for the screen (the other two being the modern-day vampire tale The Hunger in 1983 and the alien abduction trip Communion in 1989), Wolfen was co-written and directed by Michael Wadleigh, then most famous for making the documentary Woodstock. Not the most obvious proving ground for a horror filmmaker, but his background does lend the film a sense of realism that it shares with such contemporary urban fare as Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, and William Friedkin’s Cruising, to name a few.

With key scenes filmed in the shadow of the World Trade Center and in sight of the Statue of Liberty, Wolfen announces itself as a New York movie through and through. But just as Wadleigh was an unconventional choice for director, so too was his choice of leading man: British-born Albert Finney, who is nevertheless convincing as semi-retired police detective Dewey Wilson, who’s called in to investigate a puzzling triple homicide involving a super-rich real estate developer. (It’s never stated precisely why Dewey is on leave, but he’s told the reason his captain wants him on the case is because “It’s very weird and it’s very strange, just like you.”)

In the early going, Wadleigh keeps much of the gruesomeness off-screen. True, the developer’s Haitian bodyguard gets disarmed in the most literal fashion, but we’re spared the sight of his trophy wife’s head falling off when the police are taking in the crime scene the following morning. Later on, when a junkie picks the wrong spot to “get straight,” we actually get to see his throat torn out and heart unceremoniously dropped on the ground, but because Wadleigh is unable to reveal who or what is responsible for these acts, it’s impossible for them to register as anything other than quick shocks. In fact, the most effective jump scare in the film was manufactured in the editing room by zooming out from a blowup of Dewey looking out on what he doesn’t realize is the Wolfen’s hunting grounds. That can’t necessarily be attributed to Wadleigh, though, because he isn’t responsible for the final shape of the film, which was worked on by no fewer than four editors, some of whom came onto the project after he was unceremoniously kicked off it.

Supporting the late Finney is a uniformly great cast including Gregory Hines as a coroner who throws Dewey a curve by ruling out metal weapons and introducing him to eccentric zoologist Ferguson (Tom Noonan), who identifies the hairs found on the victims as being from the species canis lupus. Ferguson also makes the first connection between wolves and Native Americans, which leads Dewey to Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), a militant high-steel worker who casually tells Dewey he can “shift with the best of them.” “Shift?” Dewey asks. “Shapeshift,” Eddie clarifies. “We do it for kicks.” In short order, Dewey watches as Eddie undergoes an esoteric ritual where he accepts a ceremonial necklace, goes to the beach to strip, makes paw prints in the sand with his knuckles, and howls at the moon. He doesn’t physically change, though, which surely disappointed anybody expecting a Rick Baker or Rob Bottin-style transformation. “It’s all in the head!” he shouts in Dewey’s face, leaving an impression on the hard-nosed cop nonetheless.

When Wadleigh finally gets around to showing the Wolfen, the big reveal is somewhat underwhelming since they’re played by ordinary wolves (albeit spookily lit ones). The other area where Wolfen comes up short is the domestic terrorism subplot that takes up too much time for something that turns out to be a red herring. Its only benefit is giving Dewey a foil in psychologist Rebecca Neff (Broadway actress Diane Venora making her screen debut), who’s working for the security company that dropped the ball at the beginning of the film. Even she turns out to be largely superfluous, though, disappearing for long stretches without really being missed. It’s possible Venora had a lot more scenes that got lost in the editorial shuffle, but at least she’s around for the climactic standoff between Dewey and the Wolfen, which made sure Hines and Noonan couldn’t say the same.