It's the Wolfen!

Judging by the title of this flick, the cover art, and the plot description, you might think you're sitting down to watch a werewolf movie. That's not really the case at all. Instead, Wolfen is more of a detective story with a supernatural twist thrown in than it is a true horror flick. The acting is pretty good, the story is interesting although pretty slow in places, and the effects, when they finally happen, are actually pretty darn good. The movie comes across as a cross between Jaws and Predator, only it lacks the suspense and action those two movies were able to ramp up to.

The cast has a few familiar faces that all do their jobs well. Tom Noonan is his usual strange, charismatic self and Gregory Hines is plenty entertaining. There's even brief appearances by James Tolkan (Strickland from the Back to the Future series) and Reginald VelJohnson (from Die Hard and Family Matters). Albert Finney plays a good jaded detective who thinks he's seen it all but winds up stumbling into something way stranger then he's ever had to deal with, and Edward James Olmos plays a pretty whacked out Indian who goes to some pretty extreme lengths to wig out Finney's character.

The story starts out pretty fast, with a triple murder in the first ten minutes that's moderately gruesome and well done. Unfortunately, after that, it's about an hour of character development and investigation that turns up very little, mixed in with a number of Predator-like heat-vision POV shots. It's not really until the movie gets into the last half that things start to get interesting, and then it's not till the last ten minutes or so that it gets more high paced. The mystical wolves don't actually appear until sometime in the last half, and some of them do look a bit creepy, although the lead, white wolf is more beautiful then menacing, really. The flick does do a good job of stating that wolves have a bad reputation and don't actually run around killing people. These wolves are more the embodiement of ancient spirits then they are true animals.

There's really less gore and a lower onscreen body count in Wolfen then in Jaws, but the small bits that are shown are actually really well done. The highlight of the movie, in terms of gore, is the decapitation of one guy. His head is shown lying on the ground, eyes blinking and mouth moving, while his headless body stumbles and falls to the ground. It's a really awesome sequence that almost makes up for the last hour and a half of almost nothing happening. The movie may have been a bit more effective if they hadn't basically come right out and told everyone what was doing the killing. You start out knowing it's a wolf, or wolf-like creature, and even though you don't see them for a long time, there's plenty of wolf POV shots that are more disorienting then creepy. In fact, the most disturbing part of Wolfen might be the scene where Olmos runs around naked, pretending to be a wolf.