Bruno - Blu-Ray Review

After re-watching Bruno this past weekend, the same problem began cropping up that had occurred after seeing it theatrically – I was calling it Borat. Not just because they were both based on characters created by Sacha Baron Cohen for Da Ali G Show (they were) and not just because their formats are closely related (they are) but because the memory of the sublimely hysterical Borat looms so large over poor Bruno that it feels like an also-ran before the Universal logo is even off the screen. Interestingly, Cohen’s third character from that show – Ali G himself – had his own feature long before even Borat back in 2002; a misbegotten, unfunny flop called Ali G Indahouse that should have clued Cohen to the fact that traditional narrative storytelling was a mistake for these improvisational characters. It was easy for Borat to follow a film that most people outside the UK had never even heard of, but the decision to launch Bruno’s eponymous feature film behind one of the most surprisingly successful comedies of the decade was a poor one, as borne out by the tepid box office receipts (things got so desperate in Cohen’s native UK that the film was voluntarily edited after its release to secure a more audience-friendly 15 certificate from the BBFC). Universal, hoping that Bruno – debuting on Blu-Ray and DVD on the 17th – will make up some lost financial ground on home video, have packed the film with nearly an hour of deleted and extended scenes with a very interesting feature that appears to be exclusive to the BD release. But the question remains, is there enough bigotry and hatred in Middle America for both Bruno and Borat?

The structure of the film is astonishingly similar to that of Bruno’s Kazakhstani cousin; flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista, having suffered the indignity of a breakup with boyfriend Diesel and the loss of his show, Funkyzeit, treks to America to regain his lost stardom. With adoring assistant Lutz in tow, Bruno travels to the ground zero of meaningless fame – Hollywood – where he interviews a remarkably nonplused Paula Abdul while sitting (literally) on the backs of immigrant laborers, attends a focus group for a celebrity interview show that’s about 5% interview and 40% flailing penis, and getting instructed on hooking up with only the most fashionable charities. Bruno also goes international, attempting to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians (focusing on the terror group, Hummus) before returning to the states – including Washington, D.C., where he attempts to make a celebrity sex tape with Presidential candidate Ron Paul, and finally Texas, where, in the realization that his homosexuality might be what’s holding him back, reinvents himself as the straightest wrestler alive, ‘Straight Dave’.

Right out front, we need to mention that Bruno contains a solid number of hysterical gags; an overnight hunting trip with a stereotypically “Texas” quartet is brilliantly funny (“That is such a Samantha thing to say”) but an early scene where Bruno visits a psychic to get in touch with the spirit of ex-lover and Milli Vanilli frontman Rob Pilatus may possibly have been the hardest that we’ve ever laughed inside a theater. But the nagging concern that many had with this film holds true for us as well; on Cohen’s television show, the Bruno segment was typically the least funny of the three, mostly because spoofing the vapidity of the fashion industry is as soft as targets come. Like the feature, the TV show had its share of funny moments (like his interview of a bunch of frat boys on a beach during spring break who were clueless to Funkyzeit’s gay overtones until the very end) but the mock interview format had already been better covered by Ali G and Borat, and Bruno just felt the tiniest bit stale bringing up the rear (pun unplanned but enjoyed). After the enormous success of Borat, it just feels like Cohen is retreading the same tire, here, and one gets the feeling that even he knows that this will be the last time he’s going to get away with enough material to craft a feature (during the commentary track, Cohen and director Larry Charles mention just how many times Cohen was recognized and a skit had to be abandoned).

It’s also worth noting that Borat’s innocence in regard to the world around him was actually kind of sweet (even while he throws cash at two cockroaches he believes to be the transmogrification of the sweet Jewish couple who own the bed & breakfast he’s staying in) and helped negate the baseline of cruelty that this sort of humor plays off of. As due-paying members of the intelligentsia, we love to mock people that are dumber, poorer, and smellier than ourselves; laughing at a bunch of narrow minded hicks wearing confederate caps and shirts confirming that their anus is used for defecation only makes us feel wonderful – mostly. One could say that we reached a minor breaking point with ambush-based humor while watching Bruno, and began to feel for the mockees rather than simply laughing with the mocker. When Bruno and Lutz are bound together in an array of dildos and sexual appliances and dumped on a city bus in a mid-sized southern town, we actually caught ourselves hoping that one of these people might pick them up and toss them right off into the middle of the street. Our other issue might have more to do with necessity than intent; after Borat, there are simply too many people who will recognize Cohen, leading to far more bits that had been prepared and scripted in advance (what was our reaction to Bruno and Lutz’s fight and breakup outside of a police station supposed to be?) and Bruno simply isn’t as likeable as Borat. Is sounds silly to pit fictional characters against each other in this way, but it might well explain the low box office receipts.

Universal’s Blu-Ray release of Bruno will be making fans of Cohen very happy this week, as it marks one of the few times that Cohen discusses his work out-of-character. He and Charles appear in a PIP window discussing the film and, at certain points, literally pause the film to discuss one aspect or another (we assume that this is the feature that’s exclusive to BD). Both men are quite funny and have great stories about the shoot (like the fact that only time that Cohen was so afraid for his life that he broke camera was while being chased by orthodox Jews) and the frankly disappointing number of people who were already in on the gags. There’s also at least an hour of deleted/extended scenes, including footage of a few of the other would-be sex tape participants (again, some very big Washington names turn up here) some disturbing footage of Bruno at a gun show, and the not-nearly-as-infamous LaToya Jackson sequence that was removed when Michael died (like Paula, she happily sits on the Mexican gardener’s back and takes waaaaay too long to be freaked out by Bruno’s questions (maybe better to get someone less well acquainted with crazy next time). It’s hard to judge the 1080p image; due to the nature of the shoot, many different cameras with different resolution levels were apparently used, but this perfectly matches the look that we saw in theaters earlier this year. We did love the menu layout, featuring German-ish phrasing for each menu option, but working off the familiar Universal BD functionality.

Edward Woodward

Another sad passing to report. This morning, the superbly talented Edward Woodward, who spent a long career comfortably straddling the fence between character actor and leading man, died in a British hospital at the age of 79. Most of my fellow Americans remember him from The Equalizer (talk about an actor absolutely making a show) but to us he will forever be the doomed Sergeant Howie in 1973’s The Wicker Man.

On paper, Howie must have read like a near unlikeable stiff – an almost unbearably pious and humorless Christian who travels to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle in search of a missing girl – and it must have been a concern for director Robin Hardy and writer Anthony Shaffer that no one would care what happens to this jerk one way or another. But Woodward, with his tough, unforgiving countenance and soft heart breathed humanity into the role, making his ultimate fate all the more tragic. In fact, it isn’t an exaggeration to say that the conclusion of the film represents one of modern horror’s most truly disturbing sequences, and Woodward’s cries of “Oh, God – Oh, Jesus Christ!” will echo in memory long after the film has ended.

Another fine remembrance would be to revisit the fine Breaker Morant, Bruce Beresford’s absorbing courtroom drama about two Australian officers being court-martialed for the murder of prisoners during the Second Boer War. The film arrived on US shores in 1980 as part of a wave of extraordinary Australian films of the late 70s and early 80s that included Mad Max and Gallipoli and announced the extraordinary careers of directors like Beresford, George Miller, and Peter Weir. Morant is an actor’s showcase all the way, making international stars of Woodward and Bryan Brown, who arguably give career-best performances. Woodward would always excel at the tough-as-nails military type, but never let you forget that they were real, three dimensional men. Morant probably led to his acceptability for CBS as the lead in The Equalizer, and throughout 4 seasons of thug-busting his way through mediocre scripts, there was never even the slightest hint that he considered the material to be beneath him. For a more satisfying dose of Woodward in a weekly series, check out the little seen (at least in the US)series, Callan, an espionage drama set during the height of the cold war; he’s disarmingly young, but looks at the world around him with the same weary suspicion and droll humor that Woodward brought to nearly everything he did.

Though it wasn’t his final appearance, we’ll regard his appearance in Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz as Woodward’s true career capper. It’s a film lover’s delight to watch him along with contemporaries like Jim Broadbent, Billie Whitelaw and Paul Freeman having a grand time as members of the Sandford Neighbourhood Watch Alliance, keeping the city safe from absolutely everyone.

Summer is Icumen in
Loudly sing cuckoo
Grows the seed and blows the mead
And springs the wood anew
Sing cuckoo
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb

Cows after calves make moo

Bullock stamps and deer champs
Now shrilly sing cuckoo
Cuckoo, cuckoo

Wild bird are you
Be never still cuckoo

DVD Review - Zorro, The Complete First & Second Seasons (Walt Disney Treasures)

Once again, Disney has dipped into its seemingly bottomless vault of television productions for another gem, the complete series run of Zorro, including all 78 half-hour episodes from both seasons, plus the 4 hour-long specials. It’s been difficult to see the series since its initial run, lasting from October 1957 through June 1959; shot in crisp black and white, the series suffered a grotesque colorization for reruns on the Disney channel in the early 90s (though some episodes were shown in their original versions to please us nitpicking purists). Disney had released small groups of shows in 3-4 episode spurts through the Disney Movie Club (which for us is a nice way of saying “out of print”) making this large scale release all the more tantalizing.

Upon the return of Don Diego de la Vega (Guy Williams) to the southern California (still under Spanish rule) estate of his father, Don Alejandro (George J Lewis) a wealthy and respected rancher, he learns that the region has fallen under the control of the villainous Capt. Enrique Sanchez Monasterio (Britt Lomond). Don Diego vows immediately to use his newly acquired swordsmanship and riding skills to resist Monasterio, but decides to do so behind a black cape and mask in order to protect his family. He christens himself ‘Zorro’ (Spanish for ‘The Fox’) and becomes a thorn in the side of the Captain and his men, particularly the oafish Sergeant Garcia (Henry Calvin). But when not protecting the innocent as Zorro, Don Diego adopts the personae of a foppish intellectual, incapable of even defending himself with a sword, while his faithful manservant, Bernardo (Gene Sheldon) pretends to be ‘deaf and dumb’ allowing him to eavesdrop with impunity. But Don Diego’s lifestyle of leisure deeply disturbs his father, Don Alejandro (George J Lewis) who whishes that is guitar-strumming son were more like the heroic Zorro.

New York City born Guy Williams worked as a fashion model before a string of bit parts in the 50s brought him to the attention of Walt Disney. Italian by birth, Williams slid easily into Zorro’s cowl, and the actor’s 6’3” frame and matinee-idol looks made him an instant sensation. Missing the original airing of these episodes (and though we enjoyed the Antonio Banderas retooling, Zorro-mania has heretofore been lost on us) we were startled by Williams’ effortlessly charming performance. The actor’s natural athleticism (he apparently did quite a bit of his own sword fighting) made a formidable match with his easygoing charm. But we also found ourselves falling for the comic buffoonery of Henry Calvin’s Sergeant Garcia (think of Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes in the Spanish army and you won’t be far off). In keeping with the Disney tradition of largely non-threatening villains, Garcia barely makes a move on-camera that isn’t accompanied by a muted trumpet refrain, but Calvin always made it work, and helped the show strike that elusive balance of comedy and drama that keeps it in the radar of both adults and children (we were incredibly relieved that the show was largely devoid of Apple Dumpling Gang-style hijinks.)

The first season is neatly divided into 3 separate 13 episode story arcs, making for an astonishing 39 total episodes (compare this to any modern network series, which typically top out at 26 episodes per season, or cable, at 13). Some episodes, like the first season’s Monasterio Sets a Trap and Zorro’s Ride Into Terror even flow together, cliffhanger-style. The above description accounts for the first storyline of the first season, but the core cast (minus Lomond’s Monasterio) remained through both seasons, with a rotating cast of villains against whom Zorro battled. The remaining two storylines of the first season involve a criminal conspiracy led by the mysterious Eagle (who was more of a presence once his identity was revealed and played thereafter by Charles Korvin). The second season played a bit looser with the story arcs, allowing for more flexible storyline lengths and even the occasional one-shot (Spark of Revenge, featuring an incredibly young Robert Vaughn) though our favorite features an extended guest appearance by Cesar Romero as Diego’s scheming uncle, Estavan. Sadly, the series came to an abrupt end after the second season due to an ownership dispute between Disney and the ABC network (which also extended to the Mickey Mouse Club). During that time, four hour-long episodes were produced (all of which are included in the new sets) Williams was paid full salary during the 2 years or legal rumblings that followed, but even after a courtroom victory, Walt decided that the Zorro fad had peaked, and did not bring the series back for a third season.

Each of Disney’s new Zorro sets feature an entire season spread across 6 discs, all kept in amazingly good order within a standard-size case (something Sony can’t seem to figure out how to do without resorting to disc stacking). The image is amazingly rich for a half-century old show, with the original black and white episodes looking wonderful – much better than most other shows of this era that we’ve seen recently and easily on par with Image’s Twilight Zone sets. Disney’s historical shows of the period were generally quite sumptuously produced, with lavish attention paid to period detail and production authenticity (see 1963’s Dr. Syn for our own favorite example). The first season set leads off with Leonard Maltin’s typically good-natured intro, and also features the exhaustive The Life and Legend of Zorro, a well-produced documentary on the production of the show, along with a Zorro-related clip from The Mickey Mouse Show (the second season set features the Behind the Mask documentary). In a striking – and pleasing – packaging change from previous Walt Disney Treasures collections, the outer boxes are black-lacquer in color, but feature the usual artwork and photo reproductions along with the ubiquitous Disney ‘certificate of authenticity’. And even though they never fit comfortably back into the outer tin once opened, we enjoyed the collector’s pins enclosed in each and will be wearing the crossed swords emblem fare more often than we should.

It’s impossible to say what children today might think of the Disney variant of Zorro, but we hope that the appeal of these wonderful sets isn’t limited to the adult collector. It would be interesting to get these shows into the hands of kids who haven’t yet developed an aversion to black and white programming, as it’s far more engaging than most current kids fare (including much of Disney’s own output) and, frankly, at least as smart as a good chunk of our present prime time programming.

A lovely image for Halloween Eve...

Thank you, Sir.

Been Cruising the Newsstands for Video Watchdog, Lately?

Greetings, readers. Those of you who’ve been following this blog from the beginning may remember our first post back on Sept 14th, 2007. Since William Friedkin’s Cruising was due for its digital premiere in the 18th, we thought it appropriate that the blog’s maiden voyage should be a brief chat about our long, curious history with the film.

From the days when it was first available on the CBS/Fox video label, we felt a strange kinship with this seemingly unwanted 1980 party favor, a film that its Oscar winning star pretends didn’t exist. We were fascinated by the picture’s view of the shadowy world of the meatpacking district’s gay leather bars painted on an unfashionably nihilistic canvas. Over the years, we realized that few (if any) people cared about the show, as routine investigations brought about precious little information on the film, almost as if it slipped into a black hole. Cruising was the subject of our first foray into long-form essay writing for a friend’s online magazine (though it’s still possible to search out the article, we beg you not to as we find to be just this side of unreadable now) and we were thrilled to find it quoted from in Warner Bros. press release for the film’s 2007 DVD release - apparently, more people care about the film than we thought!

So it’s fitting that the film should mark our doorway into the hallowed halls of Video Watchdog, long considered the Bible for serious writing on the cinema of fantasy and the fantastic. When its publisher, Tim Lucas, announced earlier this year that he would accept submission proposals for the first time, we immediately sent off our proposal for an all-new article on a film which we feel – with all humility – we know better than almost anyone else. The extraordinary news that the article was accepted has been eclipsed only by the arrival last night of our own copy of Video Watchdog #152, in which the DVD spotlight bears a familiar name.



As someone who has enjoyed the opportunity for writing on genre cinema for nearly a decade, VW is a height to which we dared not aspire. It’s the height of the form and we’re still having difficulty believing that we have been welcomed into the kennel. The magazine is not available online, and can only be had at better newsstands or from their website. Enjoy!

Paranormal Psychology

We badly wanted to see horror indy Paranormal Activity before the expected backlash had time to take effect, though we did hear from lots of interwebz folks that that the film was unworthy of the massive hype machine put in place by Paramount (who picked up the $10K budgeted flick after some positive festival appearances over the last 2 years.) The Blair Witch Project introduced audiences to the 'found footage' concept nearly a decade ago (in short, footage consisting of the film/video footage shot by the characters themselves) even though Ruggero Deodato's infamous exploitation gem, Cannibal Holocaust, had used the technique rather brilliantly back in 1980 (though there was a narrative framework surrounding the use of the footage.) We were lucky to have seen BWP in its opening weekend – too early for it to become hip to hate the film – and marveled at how directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez stayed true to the '3 kids with cameras' framework and made it feel real enough to send genuine chills down our spine when the characters on screen were sure that they heard something out there. It was years before thinking back on the film's much parodied final shot lost the power to utterly spook us out. Only the Spanish REC managed to improve on the method, by taking the cameras out of the hands of inexperienced kids and into the hands a professional camera crew working for a Barcelona news station following a reporter as she films a fluff piece on a local fire department, where a routine call to an apartment building turns into the requisite night of terror. REC is an extremely polished, professional bit of filmmaking, with the presence of a professional cameraman and equipment allowing for a less nausea-inducing theater experience (and probably also holds true for its Hollywood remake, Quarantine.)

Paramount's unusual ad campaign for Paranormal Activity has focused on the terrified reaction shots of preview audiences rather than film footage itself, almost as if the studio is bashful about the film being called out as a BWP knock-off. But having finally seen the film as part of Lincoln Center's Scary Movies 3 festival , I can attest to the veracity of all those jumps, gasps, and screams (okay, we didn't actually scream – honest.) Leaving the theater, we were trying to remember the last time that genuine fear had been felt inside a movie theater, aside from the feeling that car keys had been lost at the New Roc City multiplex. Paranormal Activity centers around the videotaped nocturnal activity of a spirit that Katie (Katie Featherston) feels is invading the modern San Diego home she shares with boyfriend Micah (Micah Sloat.) Micah's attitude is far more blasé, assuming that the culprit ultimately responsible for the noises in the night will turn out to be a neighborhood peeping tom rather than anything supernatural. Micah does most of the filming, playfully taping Katie as they cook meals and lay about on their couch, but also sets the camera up on their bedroom dresser when they go to bed, affording a view of the bedroom and the upstairs hallway through the open door. Time coded footage allows us to hear the odd creak and rattle – most of which happens in the middle of the night and go unnoticed until they play the footage back the next night – which quickly turns to loud bangs and door slamming. They enlist the aid of a psychic (Mark Fredrichs) who explains the difference between the spirit of a dead human being and a demon, the latter of which he suspects may well have followed Katie from childhood. Soon, even Micah becomes a believer, even to the point of bringing home a Ouija board to communicate with it – something the psychic explicitly warned them against. Attempts to communicate, he says, will only make their presence stronger (it also won't help to move or go to a hotel as the entity will simply follow Katie.)

This isn't a film that depends all that much on plot twists and turns, but it would be criminal to spoil any of what transpires during the tenser haunting sequences. Director Oren Peli has spent two nervous years dueling with a studio that first wanted merely to buy the rights to the film and remake it with big stars and effects to match (an act that would have shown such hysterically poor judgment we almost whished that they had gone ahead so that Paranormal Activity starring Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale would be appearing on Blu-Ray just about now) only to relent once Steven Spielberg – among others – had seen the film and spotted its potential. Nevertheless, Paramount sat on the film for what must have seemed like an eternity to Peli (particularly after the red hot reception which greeted the film at almost every festival it played at.) Peli expertly exploits the terror of lying in your bed in the middle of the night, having been awakened by mysterious noises and too petrified to leave the sheets to investigate the darkness. The usual 'cat jumps through open window' to the strain of a screeching musical cue type of scare is largely absent from the film, giving it an unusual rhythm that slowly but surely fills the viewer with an sense of escalating dread; once Peli and the actors convince us of the reality of the setup (within 10 minutes we stopped thinking things like "Oh, please, why would he be filming now") even the smallest shadow or unexplained noise had the power to turn our blood frigid. Now, we can't say that this psychology will work on everyone and we can hear the complaints that it was boring and that "nothing happened". Effects in the film are smartly limited (though we have strong suspicions where the studio mandated reshoots began at the film's conclusion) and most of the what occurs is left to the imagination of the viewer.

Paranormal Activity frightened us in a way we haven't felt for years in a theater; a window into the deep, spine-chilling creepiness that sneaks into our bedrooms in the middle of the night, taking our knowledge that the supernatural doesn't actually exist and throwing it out the window.

A Wolfen in Werewolf's Clothing

Wolfen, to use a grotesque yet appropriate pun, is an unusual beast. The only post-Woodstock directorial credit for director Michael Wadleigh (and his only narrative effort) was released in the summer of 1981, wedged between two high profile werewolf pictures, Joe Dante’s The Howling and John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London. Audiences thinking that the film made up the third horse in the lycanthropic trifecta left this decidedly odd effort left feeling cheated, as the filmmakers had something more profound in mind than a simple ‘monster movie’.

After breaking ground on his sprawling South Bronx real estate project, super-wealthy businessman Christopher van de Veer and wife Pauline slip down to Manhattan’s Battery Park, where the happy couple enjoys a cocaine-fuelled frolic around a replica of a windmill erected there by van de Veer’s ancestor, all under the watchful eye of his mountainous armed bodyguard. But the trio isn’t alone in the park – something silent and swift is stalking them in the darkness, something with acute night-vision that registers even the most subtle changes in the human body’s temperature. After a few moments, the creatures strike; ripping off the bodyguard’s hand before he can get a shot off with his gun, and tearing apart the wealthy scion and his wife. The odd circumstances of the crime bring one of the NYPD’s more odd detectives onto the case, the sarcastic and possibly alcoholic Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney, marking the actor’s first lead role since 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express) who is aided in his investigation by the equally unorthodox medical examiner Whittington (Gregory Hines) and criminal psychologist Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora) who is put on the case at the behest of a shadowy international security service that provides security for executives all over the world, and are anxious to see the van de Veer case closed quickly.

The investigation leads them to several terrorist organizations that might have a bone to pick with van de Veer (who was not, as Det. Wilson points out, exactly a friend of the third world) until the body of a derelict found in a particularly desolate area of the South Bronx turns up in Whittington’s morgue. Like the van de Veer case, the skin was torn with some incredibly sharp, non-metallic blade and numerous internal organs were missing, but the body from the Bronx contained several diseased organs that were left untouched – almost as if whatever killed him was somehow able to sense this and leave them behind. A few strands of non-human hair lead them to zoologist Ferguson (Tom Noonan; for the first time billed under an actual character name and not simply as ‘Man’) who confirms that the hair is, in fact, canis lupus – a wolf hair. Dewey’s investigations also lead him to Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos) a former radical in an AIM-like Native American movement just released from prison and with one political assassination already under his belt. Speaking to Eddie requires Dewey to scale the Manhattan Bridge where Eddie works with other members of his tribe who possess uncommon skill at working Manhattan’s high steel jobs (based on the amazing story of several generations of Mohawks who came down from their reservation in Canada to work NYC’s skyline for over a century) Eddie eludes to an ability shared by some Native Americans to “shape shift” into certain animals – including wolves. With his investigation dead-ended by the supernatural, Dewey and Whittington set out for the ruins of a massive church in the south Bronx where the bodies of several derelicts have been found with their (non diseased) organs removed, armed with automatic weapons and high-sensitivity microphones.



Wolfen avoids the same trap that other ecologically themed horror films of the era fell into by managing to balance the potentially over preachy ecological agenda with effective storytelling and expertly filmed suspense sequences. Not only was this Wadleigh’s first (and, to date, only) narrative film, it was also his first time shooting with 35mm cameras and considering his inexperience the end result is startling. His Panavision cameras run, swoop and climb all over the city, making superb use of Battery Park and the financial district of downtown Manhattan, and the final sequence featuring several real wolves stalking the steps of Federal Hall says more in a few shots than 20 pages of “You have your technology, but you lost” soliloquies ever could. Much was made in 1981 of the film’s wolf POV shots, which were basically a re-jiggered thermographic image, but just as Terminator 2 overused the new-in-1991 morphing effect, so did Wadleigh (or his producers) lean on this trick a little too hard. Luckily, the non-POV location photography always gives us something interesting to look at; in addition to the sleek skyscrapers and ornately columned government and financial buildings of Wall Street, Wolfen also affords us a view of the desolate Charlotte Street area of the Bronx – an area of the borough that resembled a bombed-out European city just after the second World War throughout much of the 70s through the mid 80s. A wasteland of abandoned tenements and rubble strewn lots provide the setting for the long abandoned, cavernous, cathedral that the Wolfen use as a den (the only artificial set used during these sequences, incidentally.) The notion that a race of wolves with God-like hunting instincts living in and feeding off the garbage of our inner cities comes directly from Whitley Strieber’s novel, but the Native American mythology that serves as the creatures’ motivation comes directly from Wadleigh and co-writer David Eyre. Wadleigh’s portrayal of Native Americans is certainly meant to be respectful – even reverential – but he falls into the trap that caught many other liberal, well-meaning filmmakers by elevating them to a level of near deification. Wolfen wasn’t the first – or the last – film to imbue them with mythic qualities as a cinematic reparation for genocide, but we can’t help but groan at hearing how in touch Native Americans are over and over again. It would be quite a few years before they would be allowed to behave like normal people on screen (beautifully done in the little seen Powwow Highway) instead of a symbol of our lost connection to nature and a fashionable emblem of white guilt (we’re looking at you, Oliver Stone.)

The mere presence of Albert Finney classes up the proceedings immeasurably, though occasionally his performance seems to wander – the actor badly stumbles over a line in his very first scene – and we wonder if the inexperienced filmmaker was too intimidated to offer much in the way of precise direction. Finney’s appearances had been limited in the years prior to Wolfen, and his shaggy, disheveled appearance must have been jolting to those who remembered him as the essence of youthful exuberance in Tom Jones some two decades earlier (Finney did look a bit better rested in Michael Crichton’s Looker, out later that same year.) A bigger surprise is how handily Gregory Hines steals each of his scenes from his significantly more experienced co-star; this was the only the second major role for the world class hoofer and he lends the stock character a genuine, unforced humor that aids the film immeasurably. We re-watched The Cotton Club just a few weeks before checking out Wolfen for this review and suddenly found ourselves missing Hines in a powerful way. The almost always underused Diane Venora – a theater actress whose best film role to date is probably as Al Pacino’s unstable wife in Michael Mann’s Heat – is fine in a mostly underwritten role. Noonan, another Mann veteran, is almost too quirky as an eco-minded zoologist (though we loved the very inside NYC reference of having his character report a fire rather than calling the police – a jaded New Yorker in 1981 would have certainly known which call would generate a quicker response) but Olmos give a nice, unmannered performance as a not-quite-so-former radical (compared to some of his later performances that, frankly, you could slice with a knife.)



Wolfen turned out to be the filling of a wish sandwich when it was released in 1981 – the werewolf picture without werewolves. We’ve heard that Wadleigh wasn’t completely happy with the film’s final cut, as may be evidenced by the theatrical trailer included on Warner Bros’ DVD, which contains glimpses of several scenes not included in the film proper. Whatever the reason, Wadleigh never made another film in spite of the real promise shown here, and spends much of his time being interviewed about Woodstock and forgetting that Wolfen even existed. Warner’s DVD looks fine during the on-location daylight scenes, but nighttime and dark interiors can look quite pale. On the plus side, the Dolby Surround track is quite muscular, nicely supporting James Horner’s terrific score (so good that he used much of it the next year for The Wrath of Khan.) Sadly, no informative extras are included.