Wolf (1994)

Who's In It: Jack Nicholson (The Raven, The Witches of Eastwick, Batman), Michelle Pfeiffer (The Witches of Eastwick, Batman Returns, Dark Shadows), James Spader (Pretty in Pink, Stargate, Shorts), Kate Nelligan (the Frank Langella Dracula), Richard Jenkins (The Witches of Eastwick, Let Me In, The Cabin in the Woods, Bone Tomahawk), Christopher Plummer (Vampire in Venice, Dracula 2000), David Hyde Pierce (Addams Family Values, Hellboy, The Amazing Screw-On Head), and Ron Rifkin (Alias).

What It's About: An aging, complacent man rediscovers life and purpose when he's bitten by a werewolf.

How It Is: I almost didn't write "werewolf" in the description there, because Wolf makes a point of not using that word. But it's absolutely a werewolf movie and in my (apparently minority) opinion, a really good one.

Wolf came out two years after Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula and five months before Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, so in my mind it completed the trinity of early '90s monster movie remakes. Imagine a House of Dracula with Gary Oldman, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson. I certainly did. But because Universal's Wolf Man wasn't based on a particular novel, there was no source material for Wolf to mess up. And that made it my favorite of the three.

My love of The Wolf Man is based in the tragic relatability of its main character, so that's what I'm always looking for in werewolf movies. Wolf has that, tied into a revenge fantasy about equally relatable problems like losing your job or finding out that people you're close to are unfaithful.

Some of the set up for the revenge fantasy is obvious to the point of being trite, but the cast is so good that I never care. Even hackneyed elements like the ruthless businessman who's acquiring Nicholson's company is made fascinating because Plummer plays him with humor and a wicked twinkle in his eye. And if you're going to have a traitorous best friend, who better to play him than James Spader? And I haven't even mentioned Pfeiffer yet, who's simultaneously butt-kicking and heart-breaking as Plummer's damaged, but resilient daughter.

Rating: 4 out of 5 Old Man Logans.

31 Witches | The Witches of Eastwick

"What scares me isn't how short life is. No, it's the pain. All the pain. I don't understand why there has to be any pain." -- Sukie Ridgemont, The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

31 Werewolves | Ladyhawke

I don't usually think of Ladyhawke as a werewolf movie, but it totally is, even if it deviates from the standard legends and tropes in significant ways. Set in medieval times, it's about a knight (Rutger Hauer) who's been cursed by an evil bishop (John Wood) so that he becomes a wolf every night. The reason for the curse is that the bishop was once spurned by a woman (Michelle Pfeiffer) because she was in love with the knight. She's cursed as well and becomes a hawk every day, so that the two lovers can only ever see each other's human forms for a heartbreaking moment at dawn and dusk when they're both in mid-transformation. Matthew Broderick is also in the movie as a young thief who befriends the doomed couple, and Alfred Molina plays a wolf-trapper.

It's an interesting take on the werewolf theme. There's a bit of the traditional metaphor for unrestrained passion going on and the knight accidentally wounds the thief while in wolf form. And as often happens in werewolf fiction, neither the knight nor the lady remember anything that happened while in their animal forms. That's especially significant for this tale, because it's a deliberate part of the curse that even though they can travel together, they can't enjoy the experience. If lycanthropy is a metaphor for indulging passions, I like the suggestion that we can't even enjoy them properly when we're in the midst of being consumed by them.