Sympathy for the Bedeviled

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The sudden appearance of unsightly body hair aside, there are, it turns out, certain advantages to lycanthropy, especially in its early stages. Unnoticed by previous wolfman epics, they prove useful to Will Randall (Jack Nicholson), an editor fighting for his professional life, and equally beneficial to Wolf in establishing a tone -- half social satire, half dark romance -- that is unique in the annals of horror movies.

What hard-pressed executive would not covet the boons conferred on the depressed and integrity-ridden Will after he's nipped on the wrist by a rough beast slouching along a Vermont roadway? All his senses are suddenly sharpened: he can smell liquor on a colleague's breath at a dozen paces, overhear plotting phone calls far down the corridor, even -- literally -- sniff out his wife's affair with his chief rival (James Spader). He becomes, you might say, an animal in bed. And he, naturally, develops a taste for the jugular in matters of business.

Still, wolfmen need sympathy. They are, after all, profoundly victims, since they are usually nice guys who didn't ask for supernatural powers and take no pleasure in possessing or being possessed by them. It's Michelle Pfeiffer's task to provide Will with TLC, and as Laura Alden, his super-rich boss's daughter, she is tough, patient and fearless when at the end she must become an especially passionate animal-rights activist.

But it's Nicholson's transformations that lie at the heart of the movie's success. This may be slam-dunk casting, demonic being the thing we most happily pay our money to see him do. But he calibrates his shifts to the lupine -- a cock of the head, a twitch of the nostril, a panicky glint in the eye -- with delicious subtlety. Mike Nichols, the director, finds all the right angles to enhance Nicholson's effects, which are wholly a product of the actor's technique, not a makeup artist's.

* Nichols and the writers (novelist Jim Harrison and Wesley Strick) are treading a fine high wire; one misstep and off you tumble into self-satire, the modern horror film's omnipresent danger. But by provoking authentic laughter with their satirical thrusts at current corporate styles (Spader is a hilarious model of yuppie unctuousness), they make sure we are amused often and always at the right moments. If Nichols had less skill, we would crack up when the moon is full and Nicholson's stunt double starts leaping around the countryside, but using low light and slow motion, the director displays great tact in those passages.

There is probably not enough terror in Wolf to satisfy today's hard-core horror fan -- no chain saws or razor-sharp fingernails -- but there is a well- measured sense of pity for Will. You could, if you wish, find in him a symbol for all kinds of human bedevilment. Mix that with humor, intelligence and high-style filmmaking and you have a true summer rarity -- a genre movie for grownups.