Wolfen (

1981

)

There are few cinematic tropes more annoying for me than the romanticization of American Indians. In a way, I find the patronizing morality of Dances with Wolves (1990) more odious than the outright racism of Northwest Passage (1940). Maybe it’s the way they treat a diverse and varied people as a single monolithic culture that gets on my nerve. I mean, if you’re treating the Iroquois, the Comanche, and the Aztecs as functionally interchangeable you’re going to make some statements that are outright absurd sooner or later. Then there’s the tedious goodness of every Indian in these films, their universal understanding and appreciation for nature, their saintly patience and kindness towards the pale-faces. Come on, you’re telling me an entire ethnic group doesn’t have one or two jackasses? At least the Indians of the classic Westerns occasionally got interesting roles, like Chief Scar in The Searchers (1956). In modern films they are almost all doomed to play the same boring archetype. Surely though, there has to be some middle ground between depicting all Indians as put-upon noble savages and depicting them as bloodthirsty barbaric savages. Maybe try treating them like human beings for a change? Honestly, the only example I can think of a film that does this well is Last of the Mohicans (1992) that shows Indians in both heroic and villainous roles. The Indian villains have comprehensible motivations and goals aside from barbaric rage and the heroes aren’t noble savages at all, just the last couple badasses left of a dying race doing the best they can in a shitty situation. Still, if it’s impossible to treat American Indians like human beings, its better for the filmmaker to at least commit treating them consistently like saints or barbarians. Otherwise you wind up with a movie like Wolfen that tries to do both at the same time and consequently makes no goddamn sense.

Our movie opens with capitalist robber baron Christopher Van Der Veer, his wife, and his bodyguard being slain by an unseen creature in Battery Park. Initially the police are baffled, but not from a want of suspects. The Van Der Veer family makes a hobby out of destabilizing third world countries and associating with morally suspect regimes, making them a prime target for terrorists and disaffected radicals of all stripes. But even days after the murder, no radical group has claimed responsibility; evidentially terrorist groups were more honest in the 1980s than they are today. What’s really baffling is the nature of the murders, which look like the Van Der Veers were torn apart by some kind of wild animal. Now obviously, the audience knows where this is going on, but Wolfen is going to spend the bulk of its running masquerading as a police procedural. It’s the same technique that the giallo’s used, though Wolfen is a lot more earnest about it, for every scene of murder or mayhem we’re going to get ten or twelve devoted to crime-solving. The result is a little tiresome, as it takes the better part of an hour for Wilson to reach the same conclusion the audience got to when they saw the opening title card, that the culprit is a werewolf/skin-walker.

With the cops stumped, they call in their best man… Wait never mind, they bring a useless old drunk, Captain Wilson, out of retirement and dump the case on his desk. I’m guessing that Van Der Veer must have been giving money to the mayor’s opponent in the last election, otherwise, I can’t really understand why the NYPD is giving this such a low priority. The commissioner also partners Wilson with a criminal psychologist name Rebecca Neff, who hopefully will be able to keep Wilson sober and interested. Wilson obviously wants to screw her, so I suppose that will help with the interested part. Wilson isn’t the only one working the case though; the feds are also involved and are totally convinced that it is the work of a terrorist organization. As it turns out, Van Der Veer’s sister has joined a German communist terrorist organization, clearly modeled along the lines of the real-life Red Army Faction. They bring her in as a suspect and she even confesses to her brother’s murder. Now, in real life that would be enough to close the case, but unfortunately, the feds in this dimension are both more conscientious and technologically advanced than the ones in our own. They have invented a perfect lie detector that tells them the girl is lying about killing her brother.

As a detective story, Wolfen is deficient in some of the most important areas. It’s important in a procedural that the case follows a logical path, with each clue leading naturally to the next. There can be false starts and dead ends, but you can’t go around just skipping steps, which is exactly what Wolfen does at probably the most glaring moment possible. When Wilson first discovers a mysterious animal hair in the course of investigating the murder, he takes it to an expert to identify it. The expect tells him it’s a wolf hair, and then makes an off-hand comment about American Indians for no readily apparent reason. From that moment on, Wilson becomes convinced that this is the work of radical American Indians. I’m not asking for a lot here, at least have him say “I’ve got a hunch” to justify the leap in logic. Even more galling, the first Indian he thinks of, Eddie Holt, turns out to be the one that killed Van Der Veer. I’m starting to see why the commissioner put him on this case; Wilson isn’t just stupid, he’s stupidly lucky too.

Further investigation reveals that Eddie Holt is a member of a pack of skin-walkers (Indians who can transform themselves into various animal forms, most commonly wolves). The pack operates out of a picturesque ruined church in South Bronx and gets most of their sustenance from the impoverished underclass living in that urban wasteland. Recently, Van Der Veer had bought the land around the church and was planning to transform the whole neighborhood into luxury condos (who would want a luxury condo in the middle of a landscape that wouldn’t look out of place in The Warriors (1979) or Escape from New York (1981) is beyond me). The skin-walkers killed Van Der Veer to protect their hunting ground, which also seems a little off to me. It’s not like there was any shortage of blighted urban landscape in New York City circa 1981. Hell, the wolves could just move to Times Square and have all the food they could eat.

It’s at this point that the film’s moral core starts to fall apart. The skin-walkers will be treated with outright reverence for the remainder of the film, and the audience is outright asked to identify with them. Now, Van Der Veer was probably guilty of numerous crimes and justly deserved his death, but turning a blighted stretch of South Bronx into condos doesn’t exactly warrant a death sentence (even people militantly opposed to gentrification would have to agree as the land he’s bought up is nothing but ruins). Indeed, despite the film’s reverence for the Indian skin-walkers, it doesn’t really do much to justify their actions. The pack is a gang of parasites feeding off the most unfortunate members of society despite the fact that there are other options open to them that don’t involve eating their fellow men for sustenance. Seriously, the pack could just eat rats and squirrels rather than picking off dope fiends and drifters. We’re told plenty of times how much wiser and nobler the Indians are than us dumb pale-faces, but it rings hollow when the only Indians we see a roving pack of quasi-cannibals.

That said, there are a few moments of effective horror to be found in Wolfen. The images of the wolves (presumably trained dogs in desperate need of grooming) encircling their prey, brilliantly lighted and half-shrouded in fog, is a spectacular sight to behold. The gore is infrequent, but ludicrous and skillfully executed. I don’t think that wolves, even of the supernatural variety, would be able to pop off a man’s skull with a single bite, but I’m happy to suspend my disbelief for this at least. Indeed, whenever wolf’s attack it’s a veritable storm of flying appendages. In-between the gore there are a few moments of skillfully done suspense, only slightly hampered by the film’s unwillingness to actually show us the wolves every now and then. Less impressive is the wolf-vision that seems to have inspired the infra-red vision from The Predator (1987). I’m no expert on canines, but shouldn’t the wolf’s vision have fewer colors than normal human vision, not more?