- Directed by Michael Wadleigh
- Written by Whitley Streiber, Davis Eyre, Michael Wadleigh
- Stars Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Edward James Olmos
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 55 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L46RneepoxQ
Spoiler-Free Judgement Zone
Wolf attacks in downtown New York City? Could it be a werewolf? Maybe, or maybe it’s something even more sinister. This one tracks a detective as he finds out what’s really going on. It’s a little long, but it’s really well acted, suspenseful, and holds up really well.
Synopsis
We start out looking at various blighted New York City neighborhoods. We watch one old building being imploded. We soon see a point-of-view shot from something that seems to see in infrared or something.
As credits roll, we watch the ultra-rich Mr Van Der Veer in his limo. He’s got some outrageously over-equipped security people. Eddie runs along the bridge support and throws a bottle at Van Der Veer’s car. They park the car and get out to play with wind chimes. We see that weird point-of-view again, stalking the rich couple in the park; first, it attacks their driver/bodyguard, then his bosses.
We switch scenes to watch Dewey Wilson as he heads to work the next morning. He’s a detective, and his boss calls to tell him to check out the crime scene. The mayor is on the scene, could it be terrorism or an execution? Whittington, with the Coroner’s Office, shows Dewey what happened. At the morgue, Dewey watches a few autopsies while he eats cookies. There’s not a trace of metal in the wounds; no bullets, no knife, no heavy objects. Why could have torn the victims up like this?
Mr. Ross, the head of Van Der Veer’s security group, is also working on the case. Van Der Veer’s niece is his main suspect, since she opposed Van Der Veer’s political interests. They interview a terrorist in a room, and they use infrared to detect her lies. Dewey’s new partner, Rebecca, interviews the niece, whom the lie detectors confirm knows nothing. Dewey doesn’t believe this has anything to do with politics.
We change over to seeing a drug addict buy some pills and then go wander through the demolished tenements to get high. One of those things sees him, but the man is too high to know what’s going on.
The demolition company is working and finds several bodies. Whittington calls Dewey. The hairs on the bodies match the hairs found on Mrs. Van Der Veer. Dewey and Rebecca check out the site and are impressed with just how many abandoned buildings there are in the area. Of course, they’re being watched by something with super-hearing. Rebecca is almost attacked, but Dewey pulls her out of there fast. All Dewey saw was the red, glowing eyes.
The guy at the zoo identifies the hairs as belonging to a wolf or some related species. He explains that wolves and Indians (Native Americans) are intertwined because they had parallel evolutions.
The only Indian Dewey knows is Eddie, so they go to see him. Dewey has to climb way up to talk to Eddie at work. Eddie says he can shapeshift, and Dewey’s not sure he’s joking. Turns out, Eddie also works for the security company, and he often sits up on those bridges at night.
That night, Whittington says all the various body parts and organs they found were diseased. The autopsies show that the victim’s wounds are teeth; teeth that ate good body parts but left the diseased bits uneaten. Ferguson, the zookeeper, talks about shapeshifting being just a matter of having your mind in the right place.
Dewey follows Eddie one night. One of the older Native Americans puts a medallion around Eddie’s neck and gives him a pill. He then goes to the beach and takes all his clothes off. He climbs around on all fours, howls at the moon, and laps up water like a dog. He spots Dewey and growls at him, but he’s really just a human, pretending. “It’s all in the head,” he explains.
The real creature breaks into the zoo and follows Ferguson. He calls in a false fire alarm so that the sirens would get the animals howling. “I knew you were here,” he says, right before one of them gets him.
Dewey goes over to Rebecca’s house, and the creature outside listens to them having sex. Whittington comes in the next day and says they’ve been finding those wolflike hairs on diseased organs all over the country. There sure are a lot of missing persons in the world… Oh, and Ferguson didn’t come home last night.
Dewey and Whittington bring their guns and go into the slums that night looking for wolves. Dewey goes all over the place looking, while Whittington watches through his scope. All the while Dewey is hunting, the wolves close in on Whittington. They drag him away for food before Dewey gets there.
Dewey goes to see Eddie, who explains that it’s not wolves doing this, it’s Wolfen. They’re older than anything; their history goes way back to the earliest times. When the cities took over the land, the Wolfen moved into the abandoned buildings of the cities, preying on homeless and abandoned people. They’re a force of nature; their work is older than ours. They kill the sick and abandoned; the ones who won’t be missed.
Dewey puts it all together. The Wolfen were protecting their territory from Van Der Meer, who was planning on tearing down the tenements and making a huge new building development there. They would have lost their hunting ground, so they killed him. It wasn’t random.
As Dewey, Rebecca, and the police chief walk out of their car, they’re surrounded by Wolfen. The Chief makes a run for it, but they tear him apart. They run back into Van Der Meer’s penthouse to escape the Wolfen. The Wolfen break into the place anyway. The two detectives put down their guns and demonstrate to the Wolfen that they understand their motives and won’t try to stop them. The Wolfen then vanish into thin air.
Dewey blames it all on the terrorists and goes home.
Commentary
Supposedly, the original cut of the film was four and half hours long, so they fired the director and re-edited everything to get this. It’s a little long; I think they could have done without all the scenes in the security headquarters; this added nothing to the story.
The monster’s point-of-view shots are both the most dated and one of the best things about the film. It gives the monster a presence in the story, but this way we don’t get to see what it really is until the end.
Albert Finney really shows fear in a couple of scenes. As a washed-up detective with lots of issues, he’s a really interesting character. This was Gregory Hines’ second film role, and he knocks it out of the park as a funny but intelligent sidekick. Edward James Olmos is just… weird.
The sets and scenery in this film is what really sets the mood. Apparently, there were more abandoned, derelict buildings in New York City than my entire town has buildings. The Wolfen aren’t CGI or men in costumes, they’re simply really large, real wolves filmed to make them look larger than life. The Wolfen aren’t werewolves in the strictest sense, they’re some kind of ancient godlike beings that take the form of wolves.