Wolfen, 1981, dir. Michael Wadleigh. Criterion Channel at Home, Saturday, October 29.

Yeah, OK, Wolfen. I see it’s on the Criterion Channel, part of their very disappointing 80s Horror collection, which couldn’t actually include great horror from that decade (I’m looking at The Shining and The Thing, specifically) and instead had to drop stuff like Wolfen on us.

Look, I get it, and in some respects I was impressed by the selection of disappointing oddities they chose to represent the 1980s, that decade that produced so many cheap horror flicks. Wolfen isn’t really a werewolf film, though it was marketed that way (in 1981, the year that gave us An American Werewolf in London and The Howling). It’s the kind-of story of Native American shapeshifters who can take wolf form and butcher people. They kill a dude who is one of the wealthiest developers in America—he’s called “presidential material”, though guys like that were never truly “presidential material” until, well, 2016. Later, detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) discovers that these wolves only killed the diseased and drug-addicted, the weak ones, as wolves do (these guys had read Never Cry Wolf, apparently). There’s some amazing detail, including shooting in the very devastated South Bronx of the early 80s (it’s genuinely shocking how bombed-out it was), and little stuff like Wilson wandering around the first crime scene trying to hold onto a coffee, donut, bag of groceries and a fat Sunday New York Times, half of it spilling from his beefy arms. But Jesus, the script is just dumb, it doesn’t commit to its premise with any energy, Albert Finney (the director’s choice) is completely wrong for the part, the violence is poorly shot, there’s an “in-camera effect” to show the wolves’ POV, which has these beasts somehow following Detective Wilson around in inexplicable places, including, at the end, a good twenty stories up in a penthouse apartment, somehow breaking into the place from the balcony. Oh, defenders might say that Wolfen establishes that these Native Americans climbed skyscrapers and, here, work fearlessly on the Brooklyn Bridge (and I hate that they’re called “Indians”, because specifically in New York it was the Mohawk who did this, and its only takes a moment for people, then as now, to know this), but they can’t just climb the smooth edge of a skyscraper, that’s not how that works. And why were they watching Wilson have sex with Detective Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora)? There’s so many dumb jump scares, including the chief of police tossing a wolf hide onto Wilson while he’s working. “I couldn’t resist!” he chortles. Really? Nothing makes sense, but critics at the time lapped up the Mohawk element, even if it’s shallow and unexamined to the degree it could have been.