Wolfpack (1987).
Directed by Bill Milling
Written by Bill Milling and Fred Sharkey Jr.
Starring a bunch of adults masquerading as teens
“This isn’t football. This is gang warfare.”
The Stage.
When Sam Adams transferred to New Jersey’s Wave High School, he had dreams of playing tight end for the Wave Wolfpack, improving his social studies grades, and an eventual Princeton scholarship. Instead, he found himself in the thick of a fascist school takeover.
The Review.
I had no idea what I was getting into with Vinegar Syndrome’s Wolfpack. Based on the title and year alone, I was expecting a high school werewolf movie. This, however, went in a completely different direction. The film kicks off mid-game as the Wolfpack is on the business end of a 35-0 shellacking on their home field. The coach’s son, Ralph, is under center, even though the guy could barely throw a tantrum…and this is where Jack Butkowski’s plan comes in. With four minutes left, the offensive line turns on young Ralph. I thought we’d get an intentionally missed block, like when the Detroit Lions Lomas Brown set Scott Mitchell up to die…instead, we get the offensive lineman literally tackling his own quarterback with a late hit and then another teammate just steps on his back. Ralph leaves the game half-dead and everyone just acts like this is normal.
Soon after, Sam Adams, a kid named after a mid-tier beer and his mom come into town. He’s played by TV journeyman actor Jim Abele, who was 25 at the time this was filmed and looks every year of it. They’re staying with Pudge Purdy, an old guy who uses the auto shop at the school to tinker around. He’s like the creepy parts of Joe Biden, like getting too close to young women, mixed with the cool parts of Dennis Hopper, like owning a Delorean. On Sam’s first day, he runs into Myra Abbot and the two start dating shortly after. It’s a romance that is never given the attention it needed to feel special and if you cut the character of Myra out completely, the movie would have been exactly the same, but with a reduced hug count.
Aside from Myra, the school is filled with nothing but white assholes. Seriously, aside from one or two shots of black football players on the squad, there’s no representation here. Wave, is however, packed with the stereotypes of typical mid-80’s ‘this school is bad’ punk characters and jocks, and both groups hate each other. In the first clash we see, one of the punks is just being an asshole and throws a popsicle stick on the ground and Wedge, the offensive lineman who trashed Ralph, tells him to pick it up. Myra steps in and tells Wedge off, but I have to be honest, I was on Wedge’s side here. Fuck anyone who litters. Turns out Butkowski is trying to rid the school of undesirables - purity and power, as he says, with a football team full of guys named Wedge, Frame, and Stick ready to enforce the school rules by brute force, if necessary. Of course, Wave high school isn’t the world, as Sam rebuts, but it is, as Jack Boot says, “…a part of the world.” The fascist undertones are not subtle, especially in moments where Jack addresses crowds of likeminded nut jobs, but then again, in an age in which Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office for four years, I guess fascist subtlety is dead. As Sam attempts to distance himself from the Wolfpack, we can see everything heading towards a bombastic clash during the climax. That, unfortunately, never comes. The most intense drama we get in the film is during on-stage debates for class president spots that only really seem to matter in movies.
The film was directed by Bill Milling, a prolific porn director of such films as Virgin Snow and Blonde in Black Silk under pseudonyms like Dexter Eagle, Phillip Drexler Jr., and Craig Ashwood. It appears that Wolfpack was his attempt to get into more serious filmmaking, as this movie doesn’t have a semblance of sexuality, but after this, two middling sex comedies, and the women in prison film Caged Fury, his career behind the camera was all but over. It’s unsurprising. The lack of skill behind the camera is apparent. Shots are static and have almost no visual style outside of a cool but poorly done shot of a pack of men in wolf masks and a surprisingly stylish shot of Pudge and Sam sharing a bag of tortilla chips. Everything about the craft feels amateurish. The writer, Fred Sharkey Jr., was never credited as writing anything after this. Maybe it’s because this film has a few striking similarities to a 1981 ABC made-for-TV film in which a teacher starts an experiment in fascism that goes too far, perhaps coincidentally titled The Wave…or maybe it’s just because this film was a bore.
The End.
Wolfpack was an exercise in the underwhelming. There are a few things that would have made the film a lot better, and in today’s age, it feels like a good remake could be an easy creation. First, it feels like no one making the film had ever seen or played football. Butkowski is supposed to be some star quarterback but he looks more like Chris Everett than Jim Everett. In one scene, he throws a bomb to his new star tight end and the ball has the rotation of a fucking punt. Watch in another scene as an opposing team’s Jared Lorenzen slowly runs toward Wedge, who apparently plays both ways, and gets clotheslined in a scene that looks straight out of The Waterboy. In summation, the football action has to feel like actual football. Second, the on-field brutality needs to be shown. We’re kind of told these guys are real bad dudes but none of the action looks like it would hurt very much. And finally, if you really want to sell the Nazi overtones, there have to be some people of color in the picture.
The Vinegar Syndrome disc looks good but has some noticeable print scratches here and there. There are also some weird out of focus shots looking up at the players in the huddle, but that’s probably not Vinegar Syndrome’s fault as much as it was a problem with a poorly trained camera operator. There’s an interview on the disc with the director, but disappointingly there’s no commentary track.
