Cursed (2005)

Director: Wes Craven

Starring: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg

Run Time: 97 mins

Certificate: 15

 

Plot Outline: On their way home from a party, Ellie and her brother, Jimmy, are involved in a car accident. Whilst trying to rescue the woman from the other car, they are attacked by a werewolf and both bitten. As they start the inevitable change to becoming werewolves themselves, they realise there are certain advantages to lycanthropy. However the original werewolf is still eager to finish them off and begins to hunt them around LA.

The Review: Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson did it with Scream and now they try to reinvent the werewolf horror movie with this passably entertaining effort. I know the troubled history behind the film, with re-shoots, script re-writes, censors cutting gore out, cast dropping out of the film and so on. It's a wonder there's any end product left. You don't become a bad director overnight and Craven has had plenty of hits over the years to make me realise it's not his fault that this is a bit of a mess at times, it's the damn studio. He and Williamson don't weave the kind of magic they did with Scream but it's painfully obvious they had a good go. The problem here is that they've got all of the same ingredients as Scream but they don't attempt to turn it into a self-aware horror, something which really helped their post-modern slasher film. That had scares and laughs at the same time to really drag you in different directions at the same time. Here, the characters in the film take everything seriously, have sour looks on their faces most of the time and don't have a clue about how to deal with their situations. There's a bit of humour around somewhere but the film's audience is clearly the Buffy/American Pie age-range so expect comedy situations at the high-school and expect to see plenty of good-looking young actors being added to the body count in the process. This teen-friendly approach is what is killing Hollywood right now as everything scary is being dumbed down to attract a greater share of the audience. It's clear that the editing team did a butchers job on the film in cutting out gore and it's a major shame. It doesn't mean to say the film would have been any better but at least they don't have to insult us by removing it and doing a horrible job in covering their tracks. Don't expect to see top drawer special effects either. The transformations and werewolves here look like computer game-quality graphics and haven't been polished at all - clearly not a leap forward but a major leap back in terms of creating convincing werewolves on the big screen. Rick Baker was behind them and when you consider he was also behind the werewolves in An American Werewolf in London and Wolf, it seems as though he's getting worse at perfecting his craft as opposed to getting better. On the positive side, Christina Ricci is pretty good in the lead role taking into consideration the it-has-to-be-said pretty weak script and the problems going on around her. Jesse Eisenberg is great as her slightly nerdy brother and steals most of the film with some great dialogue.

Final Verdict: Cursed is hard to recommend simply because the end product is not what Craven and Williamson set it out to be. They have since disowned the film but we can't go back in time and prevent the problems from arising. This is the version the studio released and unfortunately it's pretty poo - simply Scream with werewolves and without the wit.