WOLF (Directed by Mike Nichols. Starring Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, Kate Nelligan, Christopher Plummer)

Wolf has much to recommend it, little of which was intended by the film-makers. It is the kind of film that generated laughter when it wants to make you scream, and leaves you awe-struck not by the special effects but by the sheer ineptness and inappropriateness of the entire enterprise. Never quite awful enough to drain its audience of energy, the ridiculous mixture of sophisticated comedy drama and hopelessly out-dated horror scores high in the so bad it’s good stakes.

Of course, Mike Nichols, a respected actor’s director, is known for sophisticated comedy drama, and the film starts promisingly as a back-biting tale of office politics and mid-life crises in a publishing house in the grip of a hostile take-over. Nicholson is a bookish, weary and embattled editor, being done down by his slimy back-stabbing protégé, played with more than his usual degree of repellence by James Spader. But being passed over for boss and effectively demoted (or moved sideways into the Eastern European department, as ruthless media baron Christopher Plummer would put it) is not Nicholson’s only concern. He’s also worried about the effects of the wolf bite he received whilst out in the country one moonlit night, as you would be if you had ever seen a werewolf move before. But apparently no-one involved in Wolf has. Not recently anyway.

The werewolf was always the poor cousin of Dracula and Frankenstein, until it was re-introduced as an object of witty, black, tongue-in-severed cheek humour with The Howling and An American Werewolf In London. These films took their ridiculousness at face value, mocking their subjects whilst simultaneously terrifying the audience with slow built tension, sudden shocks and spectacular special effects. Wolf abandons this post-modernism by treating his subject matter with total seriousness (what if werewolves really did exist, cripes?) yet undercuts even that by setting it within an inappropriately sophisticated framework. I mean, face it, it’s hard enough to believe a man could turn into a wolf, but a pipe-smoking, bespectacled book editor? It’s An American Werewolf In Hush-Puppies.

Nichols displays absolutely no feel for genre film-making in his first horror outing. He hits every cliché of the werewolf movie as if it has never been done before (during a walk in the park Jack encounters obligatory unsuspecting muggers and wakes up with severed fingers in his pocket, he sleeps in a zoo, howls at the moon and worries about what’s happening to him during these nights he can never remember) but brings no style or innovation to them. And the special effects (done, incredibly, by Rick Baker, the man responsible for the spectacular Howling transformations) don’t deserve the name, harking back to the stop action hair growth of thirties horror movies. Playing a wolfman might seem almost like typecasting for Jack Nicholson, but it would take more than a bit of extra facial fluff and some joke shop fangs to convince audiences brought up on animatronics and morphing.

Jack has rarely looked so undignified than when he is called upon to chase after a deer, shambling along like a pot-bellied hair-ball behind a lithe bambi. The rather hackneyed way Nichols chooses to demonstrate his star’s new found speed and strength is by slowing the action down, a technique he uses to laughable effect in a finale that resembles an episode of the Six Million Dollar Man, complete with slo-mo runs and huge trampoline propelled leaps.

As the love interest, Michelle Pfeiffer is not called upon to do much more than look good on the poster campaign. Despite her astonishing beauty and undoubted thespian gifts, she seems happiest (well, least unhappy) playing drab and dull. She and Jack get it on (and Michelle gets ’em off) but all the sparks are flying from Jack. As wolfman Jack rediscovers his virility and plays power politics in the office, you get an inkling of what Nichols and Nicholson intended: a metaphor for middle-aged sexuality. But it is hard to convincingly carry off a mid-life crisis movie if the crisis is that you are turning into Lon Chaney Jnr. More of a howler, than a howling.