Werewolf movie, with airs. The careful, cautious, gradual progression -- into lycanthrope legend from a solid reality base of office politics, marital infidelity, and other mundanities -- carries with it the pretension of "specialness," of doing something never before done, of going somewhere never before gone. The movie behaves, with all due deliberateness, as if it were blazing a new trail in the age-old genre. And in a sense, it is. The classy treatment. The big-star treatment. Not necessarily the first such (cf., Wolfen), but the most such. The classiest. The biggest-star. No argument there. It seems leery of curling up with other werewolf movies for the same reason given for not lying down with dogs: getting up with fleas. The appropriate complaint about all this, accordingly, would be the excess of respectability, of civility, of tameness (surely an insult in lupine society). Even when the moon is up and the wolfman metamorphosis is in full swing, the makeup effects of Rick Baker, who worked also on An American Werewolf in London, are minimal and subtle: a trimming of Victorian mutton chops to dress up the actor's melodramatic mugging. The wolf -- the mythic wolf -- the symbolic wolf -- is after all only an "analogue," as the script labors to make plain, to something already inside a man, something that, when aroused, poses a danger to his enemies at the office, to his unfaithful wife, to his new girlfriend (a broth-thin role for the emaciated Michelle Pfeiffer). In that respect, however, Jack Nicholson appears miscast. Though he holds himself relatively in check -- relative, let's say, to The Shining or to Batman -- he is too wolfish an actor to begin with, too dagger-eyed and drooling-mouthed. Or perhaps that's just another way of saying that the filmmakers are too aware of what they're up to: the tellers of horror stories ought never to use words like "analogue" and "correlative" any more than they should use "horrible" or "ghastly." With James Spader, Christopher Plummer; directed by Mike Nichols. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.