Hunting in the Burned Out Heart of Modern Society

It's October, time for monster movies.  This is number three for the month.

In arrogance man knows nothing of what exists. There exists on this earth such as we dare not imagine; life as certain as our death, life that will prey on us as surely as we prey on this earth.

A big part of why I picked this movie was because of Tom Waits' role in it.  But, sadly, Tom’s scene was cut from the DVD (and Netflix) version of the film.  Sigh…

There was still plenty in the film to enjoy.  Like Edward James Olmos (recent star of Battlestar Galactica ) – actually too much of Olmos, maybe – Gregory Hines and, hey look, it’s Reginald VelJohnson not playing a cop for once – all  in a movie based on a novel by that UFO freak, Whitley Strieber.

It is, on its surface, a werewolf movie.  But again, it is not a werewolf movie.  There’s much more going on. As police detective Dewey Wilson investigates a set of particularly violent murders, he slowly realizes that the victims were killed by some kind of animal.  He suspects wolves, but his investigation leads him to Native American beliefs in the Wolfen… not wolves. 

The film is located within the decaying heart of New York City.  Urban decay is both the setting and the theme of the story.  The wolfen live in a burned out church – a symbol of the spiritual center of a community that is abandoned and empty, now invaded by dark and threatening forces.  No one cares about the hundreds of people who go missing every year, not when they’re winos and drug addicts living homeless in the city’s shadows. But when the dead are prominent and powerful socialites, that’s when the police are called.

The movie is about power and wealth and poverty and struggle. 

Wolfen is notable for its use of an in-camera effect to suggest the POV of the creatures – similar to that later used in the Predator movies. There are some breathtaking scenes filmed atop the Brooklyn Bridge.  But the scenes filmed in the Brox make the movie. Instead of werewolves on a foggy English moor, the wolfen live amongst the heaps of rubble. They roam the squalid and devastated areas.  They hunt in the burned out heart of modern society.

Tom Waits may have been cut from the movie, but here's the song he would have been singing ...