Cursed review
A Wes Craven/Kevin Williamson horror movie with a hot young cast? What could go wrong?
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
Cursed
Directed by Wes Craven
Written by Kevin Williamson
Starring Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Judy Greer, Milo Ventimiglia, Mya, Shannon Elizabeth and Scott Baio
Cursed Review
This is the Full Moon Feature I was kind of dreading. Not enough to avoid covering the movie…but enough to have never seen it before doing so. As Cursed turns 20 we have no choice but to take a deep breath, grit our teeth, and get through this. Full disclosure: I never expected the movie to be as bad as contemporary reviews made it out to be. What I expected is pretty much what I got. A bad werewolf movie with some fun ideas, a good cast, and more misses than hits. Given the quality of many werewolf movies out there…that shouldn’t be a big deal. Given the names attached on the creative end, however…it is.
Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson made magic in 1996. Scream was more than a movie…it was a movement. The razor-sharp script and steady hand of a seasoned horror director resurrected a genre that was on its death bed. The duo combined for two great sequels in 1997 and 2011. They also made Cursed. It’s the only non-Scream project written by Williamson to be directed by Craven. A cause for celebration ahead of its 2005 release. A head-scratching disappointment in retrospect.
In the interest of fairness, it must be pointed out that the movie isn’t their full vision. Despite launching an incredibly successful franchise for Dimension Films…the studio saw fit to mess with Cursed in every way imaginable. Production was halted because they weren’t happy with the script or creature effects. Cast members dropped out. Parts were re-written. Rick Baker’s transformation effects were tossed aside in favor of CGI. They even went back to reshoot the ending they demanded be rewritten in the first place. Your basic complete mess.
Which is why discussing this Craven/Williamson project is so distressing. There is every chance the original version of Cursed had the brilliant exploration of tropes that their best-known work achieved. Williamson may have had a lot of clever things to say about the werewolf genre. Craven could have found countless ways to play with them. Instead, Cursed is reduced to flashes of ideas that work. Flashes that are mostly drowned out by a routine werewolf story that fails to establish its rules before they can be played with. The lack of interesting things to say about such a specific type of horror tells you pretty clearly that Williamson’s best was left on the cutting room floor.
Just in case there was any chance of a fun time in the new material…Dimension demanded cuts from the R rated movie shot to provide a PG-13 movie for theaters. After the studio ballooned the budget with rewrites, reshoots and recasting…it had no chance of making the money back anyway. Sure, more people could conceivably see it with the more family friendly rating. Why would anyone want to? They must have been banking on the cast drawing eyes to it (or getting a full Craven/Williamson Scream bump despite not letting them…you know…make the movie they wanted). Thinking that the fresh faces built for (at the time) The WB Network were still going to draw big money in 2005 is the kind of thought that the people responsible for this mess would have.
Not that the cast is bad. Christina Ricci, Joshua Jackson, Jesse Eisenberg, Milo Ventimiglia, Michael Rosenbaum, Shannon Elizabeth, Mya, Portia de Rossi, Judy Greer are the kinds of faces you’d seen in the post-Scream horror era. An all-star cast…and Scott Baio for some reason. One of the weirdest aspects of Cursed is that Ricci’s character works for The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. Fittingly, that show didn’t even exist by the time Cursed finally staggered into theaters. Kilborn appears as himself. Shockingly this didn’t move the box office needle.
The story involves siblings (Ricci and Eisenberg) who become cursed after coming across a wolf. The rules state that they can be cured if the werewolf who started things is destroyed. Silver doesn’t work (although it hurts them and is used to identify who is cursed). You must separate the brain from the heart. Fine. People seem to be able to transform whenever they want to during a full moon. Jake (Joshua Jackson) is the wolf who started everything, and he can control it. Which leads to a headache of storytelling due to multiple rewrites. Jake ends up being the bad guy despite several scenes showing him earnestly trying to help. Logic gaps created by…you guessed it…another ending change. The sympathetic ending where Jake asks to die to end the curse is thrown out for a rote heel turn.
Not that Jake was the best guy in the world, to be fair. But that was actually one of the more interesting aspects of Cursed before the multiple changes destroyed it. Jake wasn’t a great guy in his regular human persona…but he was a good “cursed” human. Born into it and unable to prevent its spread…he conquers his beast and wants to do the same for others. Until he doesn’t. Because Dimension Films said so.
We actually get two bad guy twists back-to-back because of the tinkering. Judy Greer’s character is revealed as the bad wolf…a woman scorned after a night with Jake unintentionally infects her. She’s great when the turn happens…and the movie does not need the second one at all. Greer’s part leads to the, by far, best moment in Cursed. After the police arrive, Greer’s wolf runs away. Ricci’s character (Ellie, I don’t know why I keep calling them by the actor’s names) goads the werewolf into returning by insulting her appearance. The werewolf (played by Derek Mears) flips off Ellie and is immediately gunned down by the cops. It’s hilarious. If only more of Cursed was.
The movie looks at the early days of a person dealing with their curse. Jimmy (Eisenberg) spends most of the first two acts researching werewolves. You’d think this would lead to a deep understanding of the rules here. It does not. He doesn’t get into the action of the story until his new confidence allows him to stand up to the school bully (Ventimiglia). They do battle in, because every high school werewolf must play sports, amateur wrestling. Well…pro wrestling moves on an amateur mat.
There are a few nods to Lon Chaney’s classic Wolf Man, as you’d expect from a Williamson script. A fortune teller (de Rossi) warns people about the curse…which is straight out of the 1941 Universal Monster movie. There’s even a wax statue of Chaney’s Wolf Man hanging around. It looks more lifelike than the horrific CGI transformations that characters have to endure. A digital disappointment right out of 2005.
The cast does what they can. Ricci and Eisenberg have good sibling energy. Greer is great. Poor Jushua Jackson is playing three different rewrites of the same character…who wasn’t even the original creation. That was a character played by Skeet Ulrich who left the production when the changes began. There’s a decent energy to Cursed and the Judy Greer wolf story ends up being fun. The lack of gore is disappointing. At one point, Mya is stalked around a parking garage (they’d do it better in Scream 4) …and when the wolf finally gets to her…the movie just cuts to black. Outside of a brief glimpse of Jake’s decapitation with a shovel…there’s nothing memorable here.
In the end, Cursed has, itself, been decapitated with a metaphorical shovel. Craven and Williamson’s original vision becomes a mess unworthy of their combined credit. It’s not just the lack of comedy, blood or wit that hampers the movie. It’s how little the story has to say about anything that’s going on, or werewolf stories in general. That’s how you know this wasn’t what Williamson originally wrote…or what Craven signed up for. We’ll never get that version of Cursed. An aptly titled production that is even more of a bummer to talk about than it is to watch.
Scare Value
Who knows what Cursed would have looked like without studio interference. What we got isn’t quite as bad as you may have been led to believe. It also isn’t good. There’s a more pressing issue than what was cut or what terrible effects were inserted. What is in the movie we got is never scary and rarely funny. Still, the movie has some energy and tries to do fun things with its werewolf story. Even if the rules feel like they’re being made up as they go along. Whatever the original version of Cursed was…there’s no doubt it is better than this.
2/5
Cursed Links
Rent/Buy on VOD from Fandango at Home and Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
