5 things to love about Wolfen (1981)

What’s it about:
Albert Finney is a New York cop tasked with investigating the brutal murder of a real estate tycoon and his wife. All the clues point to the killer being a group of wolves, possibly even werewolves(!), who are hiding out in the ruins of the Bronx.

5 things to love:

1. The POV shots in the film are really well done. It’s similar to Predator but rather than pixelated bright colour it’s done with an effect I’ve never seen before. It sort of inverts certain colours. The camerawork in these sequences are super smooth. There’s a part where it ascends a spiral staircase that I can’t figure out how they did so well. It’s mesmerising.

2. The setting is also very cool. A lot of it is shot in the ruins of New York’s Bronx district. I’ve seen glimpses of this period before but never in such detail. Rubble strewn blocks with single burnt out buildings still standing. It all looks amazing. Hats off to cinematographer Gerry Fisher (Highlander, Exorcist III).

3. At one point Finney’s character climbs the Brooklyn Bridge to talk to a group of Native American construction workers. It’s a super tense scene with Finney using safety lines to secure himself. You can tell they didn't fake this.

4. The film is full of great performances: Gregory Hines as a morgue attendant, Tom Noonan as an animal expert but far and away the most memorable is Edward James Olmos who gives a crazy and ballsy performance - both figuratively and literally - as at one point he runs around a beach naked at night pretending to be a werewolf.

5. Though the film is very down to earth and realistic for most of the running time it occasionally bursts into flurries of super insane violence. At one point, a wolf bites a man’s head clean off. The head falls to the floor and the man is still able to blink for a few seconds before the car next to his body explodes!

1 thing it didn’t need:

The sex scene between Albert Finney and his love interest. No thanks, didn’t need to see that.

Underrated 90s horror comedy: An American Werewolf in Paris (1997)

Following on from my last post about Freaked I thought it might be a nice to review another film written (at least in its original draft form) by the same writers - Tom Stern and Tim Burns. An American Werewolf in Paris is the very belated sequel to John Landis' landmark werewolf film An American Werewolf in London. Upon release the film was almost universally panned as being an inferior film but taken on its own terms, divorced from the earlier film, it's actually pretty good. Well, in my opinion anyway.

The film sees Tom Everett Scott play Andy, one of three American backpackers on a tour of Europe. The three guys have been doing daredevil stunts in every city they stop at and Andy plans to make Paris the biggest one yet by sneaking on the Eiffel Tower at night and bungee jumping off. However as he is about to make his attempt he sees Seraphine (Julie Delpy) try to commit suicide and ends up saving her life. As the two are drawn together Andy discovers that Seraphine is actually a werewolf and pretty soon he gets bitten too. Can they stop Seraphine psychotic ex-boyfriend Claude from unleashing his army of werewolves?

As I said reaction at the time was along the lines of “Why the hell are they cashing in on making a belated sequel to a classic movie that no one wants?” Little did we all know that one year later John Landis would do the exact same thing to his own Blues Brothers movie with the god awful Blues Brothers 2000. As far as the original American Werewolf in London goes, I'm not a massive fan. It's an okay movie but it feels very disjointed and doesn't really have much of an ending. Don't get me wrong the special effects work by Rick Baker is awesome but the story and acting are only so-so.

As I said, despite the similarities in plot - American backpacker falls in love with nurse, gets turned into a werewolf - you really need to take An American Werewolf in Paris on its own. It's far more of a straight forward comedy where the original film was very much long stretches of horror punctuated by comic overtones. For the most part I think the film succeeds, it's very much an over-the-top farce with werewolves. Don't be expecting the bleak ending of the original either, I don't think it ruins anything to say that the ending is very much a happy one.

Tom Everett Scott does a great job in the lead. He's very reminiscent of an 80s Tom Hanks (which is likely why he got cast in That Thing You Do). Julie Delpy looks a little lost by comparison but gamely gets topless in one scene. Best of all of them is Vince Vieluf who plays Brad, one of Andy's friends, who gets turned into a horrifically ripped up ghost corpse (like Jack in London). There's some brilliant visual gags where only Andy can see and talk to him but everyone else sees him talking to thin air. In one part Andy points at Brad and says “You're dead, they pulled you out of the river” but everyone around him sees him pointing at a cooked trout.

I'm not denying there's some bad points in the film. The CGI, which drew a heavy amount of criticism at the time, is quite ropey in some scenes but I don't think it ruins the film as a whole. It would have been nice for the effects to be practical models but with all the werewolf on werewolf action it would have probably looked even worse. Pick any one of The Howling sequels to see what happens when you try and do practical effects on a budget.

The director Anthony Waller, who also co-wrote the script, keeps everything moving at a great pace. The whole film saturated in that yellow-y glow that all European cities have. It's disappointing that he didn't take advantage of more of the city's locations to give it more of a French flavour. Waller stages some nice thrilling sequences though, such as a rave club that turns into a werewolf attack (not unlike Blade) and a creepy bit with a paraplegic werewolf. There's also a very witty bit where one of Andy's friends who escapes the evil werewolves having been crucified by dragging this huge crucifix on his shoulders.

In the end, I think this is one film that got a bit of unfair press on release that is actually pretty enjoyable. I'll be looking at Anthony Waller's earlier film Mute Witness next, which again shows his penchant for witty horror comedies.