Wolf is a 1994 horror romance starring Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer, James Spader, and Christopher Plummer. The plot concerns an editor, Will Randall (Nicholson) who discovers that he has become a werewolf after being bitten by a dying wolf. The movie revolves around a number of themes related to masculinity and what it means to be a man – emasculation, insecurity, male mid-life crises – and received mixed reviews upon release, with some praising the performances of the leads and the first act, but lamenting the third-act slide into horror-movie cliché.
Wolf (1994) cast
- Jack Nicholson as Will Randall: a middle-aged editor-in-chief of a publishing house undergoing a mid-life crisis. Will is struggling to deal with what he perceives as his increasing irrelevance, both personally and professionally.
- Michelle Pfeiffer as Laura Alden: a stubborn, somewhat entitled rich girl and the daughter of Will’s former boss.
- James Spader as Stewart Swinton: a conniving young publisher and Will’s protégé. Stewart is the film’s main antagonist, and his youthfulness and ambition are a source of great anxiety for Will.
- Christopher Plummer as Raymond Alden: a ruthless publishing magnate who acquires Will’s publishing house and fires him in favor of Stewart. Raymond is Laura’s father.
The plot of Wolf (1994)
Publisher Will Randall, driving home in rural Vermont, strikes a wolf and stops to inspect the animal. This is a super bad idea as the wolf promptly bites him and runs off. Will, not knowing he’s in a horror movie, thinks nothing of this and goes home.
Will’s publishing house in New York City is taken over by a ruthless business tycoon named Raymond Alden (Plummer). Plummer promptly fires him and promotes the unctuous, insincere Swinton (Spader) into his position. To add insult to injury, it turns out Swinton is nailing Will’s wife. This is the most emasculated anyone has ever been since Theon got his junk chopped off in Game of Thrones.
Will goes into a full mid-life crisis, leaving his wife and befriending a woman that is way too young for him but that’s fine because this is a Hollywood romance, Laura (Pfeiffer). Laura is Raymond Alden’s daughter and takes great pleasure in sticking it to her father by entertaining the idea of Will sticking it to her.
That night, Will makes his first transformation into a werewolf. He stalks the forest on the Alden estate and kills a deer with his claws and teeth, which is a metaphor for reclaiming his masculinity. Laura is not thrilled that Will just disappeared.
Will goes to see a stereotypically spiritual non-white guy get the skinny on his lycanthropy. The shaman/witch doctor/wizard gives him an amulet that will apparently keep the beast at bay and begs Will to bite him so that he does not die from his terminal illness. Will refuses.
Despite having a magic anti-werewolf amulet, Will still turns into a werewolf and breaks into the zoo. He steals handcuffs from a cop like a wolf would and is then attacked by Central Park muggers because this is a movie set in New York. He attacks the muggers wolfishly, biting the fingers off one of them.
Will is newly self-confident because of his wolfy mojo and manages to outmaneuver Swinton at work, ousting him from his position and then firing him. Will pisses on Swinton’s shoes to quite literally mark his territory and then bites him. Will, still not realizing that this is a horror movie, doesn’t seem to realize that this is super dumb.
Will continues to male mid-life crisis all over the place by sleeping with a girl that, whilst perhaps not young enough to be his daughter, is easily young enough to be his much younger sister. During this turn of events, Will’s now-estranged wife is eaten by wild dogs or something in Central Park. Will suspects that he might be the wild dog in question.
Laura also suspects this and goes to the police station. Whilst there, she runs into Swinton, who is very sexually aggressive towards her and also has golden eyes. This leads Laura to guess the bottom-of-act-2 twist that Swinton is also a werewolf, and is the true culprit of Charlotte’s death.
Laura goes back to the barn on her estate where Will has restrained himself. Unfortunately, werewolf James Spader has followed her and intends to violate and kill her. This really pisses Will off, and the two of them recreate your typical Wolverine-Sabertooth fight in the barn. The wolf Jack Nicholson wins because he is Jack Nicholson and James Spader is not. Will runs off because he is now part man but all wolf.
The police arrive, and Laura sorta tells them what happened. She tells one of the policemen she can smell vodka on his breath, indicating that she has a really good sense of smell but who knows what it means. She looks wistfully into the night, getting ready to become a Michelle Pfeiffer werewolf.
Wolf (1994) production, release, and trivia
The movie was shot in the spring and summer of 1993, from early April to late July. The movie was primarily filmed on soundstages in Los Angeles, but a number of scenes were shot on location. The exterior shots of Raymon/Laura Alden’s estate were shot in Nassau, New York, and Will/Stewart’s publishing house was the legendary Bradbury Building in Los Angeles – a building that was also used in the movie Blade Runner (1982).
Though finished in 1993, the original ending – in which Nicholson’s character was kept secluded and occasionally visited by Pfeiffer’s Laura via helicopter – was reshot after negative audience reactions.
The movie features a young David Schwimmer as a police officer. Schwimmer would become a household name mere months after the movie’s release, as the sitcom Friends hit the small screen in September of 1994.
Wolf grossed $131 million worldwide, with a domestic box office of $65 million and an international take of $66 million.
The male and female leads of the movie – Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer – both played Batman villains opposite Michael Keaton, in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992) respectively.
Wolf (1994) review
Though the plot is not particularly inspired, the movie is made by the sheer charisma of 90s Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. The film’s undertones of male anxiety, mid-life crises, emasculation, reclamation of power, and male sexual voracity – all represented by the transformation of both the male protagonist and antagonist – are not exactly subtle, and nobody could ever accuse the movie of being Oscar bait.
That said, Wolf is a thrilling romp, a rip-roaring horror movie with some great effects from makeup legend Rick Baker, a scenery-chewing turn by Jack Nicholson, and a spirited, take-no-shit turn from an at-the-top of her game Michelle Pfeiffer. We very much recommend howling at the moon with Wolf if you get the chance!
