While it fails to be as engaging or as scary as it should, this appears to have been a very influential movie ... it takes the genre of the gritty cop thriller and combines it with horror and science fiction elements to create an atmosphere that was later continued in movies like "Aliens" or "Predator". The pacing and the soundtrack of this movie practically invented a whole new genre that went on throughout the eighties. Even the idea of the distorted POV shots of the 'Wolfen' were used again in "Predator", and "Predator 2" moved the action back to a big city to create a very similar movie to this.



The reason it was so influential was because of the director, Michael Wadleigh, who was certainly extremely talented. It's a damn shame he didn't make more feature films as no doubt they would have been great. Everyone else involved in the movie does a reasonably good job -- Albert Finney gives a laid-back, worn-out performance which is really what the part called for. The best performance probably comes from Edward James Olmos, who appeared a couple of years later in the similarly noir-ish science fiction movie "Blade Runner".