6.5 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A New York cop investigates a series of brutal deaths that resemble animal attacks.
Starring: Albert Finney, Diane Venora, Edward James Olmos, Gregory Hines, Tom NoonanHorror | 100% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Sci-Fi | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Wolfen masquerades as a werewolf movie, but it's something else. Appearing in the same year as The Howling and An American Werewolf in London, the film initially seemed like a typical case of Hollywood's copycat syndrome—until people actually saw it. Director and co-writer Michael Wadleigh, making his first film since the landmark 1970 documentary Woodstock, had transformed novelist Whitley Strieber's horror tale about super-predators into a kind of mystical science fiction. Wadleigh's ambition to create a panorama of contemporary urban life across which the story's police detectives tracked their mysterious killers resulted in a director's cut that was late, over budget and far too long—or at least so claimed the film's producers, who fired the novice fiction director during post-production. The ensuing arbitration led to key changes in the standard contract used by the Directors Guild of America, but they came too late to salvage Wadleigh's version of Wolfen. The film was released on July 24, 1981—a year later than planned—and Wadleigh's name remains on it, despite his request to have it withdrawn. The director has never made another non-documentary film. Despite Wadleigh's dismissal, much of his vision survives in the extant version of Wolfen, because it is central to the story's design. Wolfen is set in a shattered urban landscape that raises fundamental issues about modern life that remain with us today. (What the Bronx was in 1980, Detroit is now.) As the police investigation seeks a solution for murders that stubbornly resist easy explanation, the investigators keep coming up against conflicts that resonate far beyond the case they are investigating. As the best sci-fi often does, Wolfen peers into an alternate world, but that world reflects our own back at us.
Wolfen was shot by British cinematographer Gerry Fisher (Highlander and The Exorcist III) in anamorphic widescreen. Having directed Woodstock, Wadleigh was familiar with the challenges of shooting on location, but one can only imagine the security precautions required to film in the crime-ridden South Bronx of the early Eighties. The only structure created by the production company was the derelict church that serves as a point of reference; everything else was shot "as is". The Warner Archive Collection's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray provides a very fine reproduction of Fisher's lighting, which ranges from the cheerful sunlit daytime in Battery Park, where the ravaged bodies are found, to the clinical autopsy tables of the morgue, where Dewey Wilson snacks indifferently while awaiting results, to the dark interiors of Executive Security, where technicians and supervisors peer at dials and readouts, while suspects are interrogated in the neighboring room. The image has a pleasingly film-like texture, with just an occasional hint of sharpening here and there. Black levels are very good, and the color palette is generally realistic, with the obvious exception of the thermographic vision that indicates the killer's point of view. The film's grain pattern is visible but never intrusive. WAC continues to encode at high average bitrates. Its target seems to be 35.00 Mbps, which is the average on this disc.
Like Outland and Altered States, Wolfen was released on both 35mm prints in Dolby Stereo and on 70mm in a six-track mix utilizing the short-lived "Megasound" format that enhanced low frequencies. Warner's 2002 DVD had a stereo track, but WAC's Blu-ray comes with a 5.1 track encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA. WAC went to great effort to obtain the "Megasound" mix for the Blu-ray's track, and the results are worth it, because the bass extension is impressive at numerous points, including gun shots, various sounds of city life, heartbeats heard by the title "villains" and some of the deeper notes in James Horner's score (from which Horner cribbed various elements for Aliens three years later). Stereo separations are distinct, dialogue is clear and the track has excellent fidelity overall.
Except for a trailer (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 2:17), the disc has no extras. Warner's 2002 DVD was similarly featureless.
It is doubtful whether Wadleigh's version of Wolfen can ever be reconstructed, as happened recently with Clive Barker's Nightbreed. Contemporary accounts of the dispute between the director and his producers suggest that the director's cut was never completed. Indeed, a crux of the dispute was the repeated postponement of the release date, because scenes remained to be filmed, and Wadleigh contended that he was denied the opportunity to preview his version before an audience. In any case, what remains is a unique and impressive film, and WAC has brought it to Blu-ray with its customary care. Highly recommended.
1978
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