Cursed (2005)

Still trying to get over the deaths of their parents, siblings Jimmy and Ellie have other things to worry about after they are attacked by a werewolf on their way home one night. The things start to get hairy - literally. As the full moon grows closer and the bodies begin to pile up, they learn that to undo the lycanthropic curse they must find and destroy the source.

There was a time when Wes Craven was the godfather of all things ...
...with his "Nightmare on Elm Street" films (before they descended into self-parody). Then he reinvented the teen slasher genre with the original and best self-referential horror movie "Scream". Now those halcyon days seem long gone and he is happy to make tired retreads of lame 1980s' screamers. "Cursed" is a mongrel hybrid of "Teen Wolf" and "The Lost Boys". It starts out in almost identical fashion ... more

Still trying to get over the deaths of their parents, siblings Jimmy and Ellie have other things to worry about after they are attacked by a werewolf on their way home one night. The things start to get hairy - literally. As the full moon grows closer and the bodies begin to pile up, they learn that to undo the lycanthropic curse they must find and destroy the source.

There was a time when Wes Craven was the godfather of all things creepy, giving thousands of people bad dreams and sleepless nights with his "Nightmare on Elm Street" films (before they descended into self-parody). Then he reinvented the teen slasher genre with the original and best self-referential horror movie "Scream". Now those halcyon days seem long gone and he is happy to make tired retreads of lame 1980s' screamers. "Cursed" is a mongrel hybrid of "Teen Wolf" and "The Lost Boys". It starts out in almost identical fashion to the latter at a Californian funfair, features lots of hot young things in peril (including a Jamie Gertz look-alike), a geeky hero who attains supernatural powers, some dull genre stereotypes and by-the-numbers plotting. It seems old habits die hard as he once more falls into silliness and self-parody. The problem is that he can't decide whether the wants the film to be funny or frightening and as a result it is neither. I can't decide if it is trying too hard or not hard enough - either way it's crap. It's got its tongue too far in its furry cheek for it to frighten and Craven has neither the balls nor the budget to pull off even the most basic of scares. It had such potential and a reasonable cast but he has made a royal hash of it. The pacing is pedestrian with too many people standing around, waiting to be attacked. There is a total absence of suspense; it's clear from the off who's going to be eaten and even who the werewolf is (though the writer tries to throw you off the scent by chucking in another lycanthrope). It trades in cheap horror movie clichés we've seen a million times before, done a million times better; from people going into the cellar on their own, cut and slash dream sequences, waking up naked in the bushes, footprints that turn into pawprints, people emerging unexpectedly from the shadows and so on and so forth. It doesn't even have the decency to steal from good genre pictures - it's all nicked from low-grade tat like "Teen Wolf" and the awful "Nightmare on Elm Street" sequels. Even the attempts at humour are laboured (LA lights in the shape of a pentagram, anyone?) And the all-important transformation sequences look like they've been banged out on a ZX Spectrum. It's a self-indulgent embarrassment on the scale of watching your parents do the lambada in public.

"Scream" scribe Kevin Williamson must have run out of ideas; that's the only reason I can think of for this incredibly lazy, hugely derivative screenplay. Perhaps it's trying to be post-post-ironic by returning to the format for any number of samey teen horror pics from the 1980s. This is what happens when a retro fad goes mainstream; not only are we plagued by teenagers with mullets and legwarmers, but the same ideas are recycled too. The characters are all cardboard cut-out stereotypes; the uptight girl, the geeky boy, the cheerleader, the bully and the suspicious boyfriend. The real problem is that Williamson makes no attempt to flesh them out - they may as well be glove puppets for all the realistic character traits and motivations they have. The other huge problem is that the curse isn't much of a curse; if anything, being bitten by a werewolf causes incalculable improvements to the victims' lives. I mean enhanced strength, senses and unnatural sexual allure - who wouldn't want that?!? Okay having another werewolf trying to hunt you down and kill you is more of an issue, but as long as you stay in brightly lit, well-populated spaces, it doesn't seem to be much trouble. Where Williamson excels is in providing his characters with pithy (or at least well-observed) one-liners but for some unfathomable reason, there is a dearth of them here, preferring to stick with taunts about characters' sexuality and pointless fawning over Joshua Jackson. There are one or two (like a breathless, almost hysterical speech when one male character makes a pass at another), but it's not enough to carry the whole film.

Christina Ricci has fought a very public battle with eating disorders over the years and from the look of her here it would appear she's on the losing side at the moment. She is an attractive young woman who looks her best with curves, but here she's so scrawny that her overlarge eyes and enormous forehead dominate her appearance. To be fair she gives the role of Ellie far more spark than it deserves, but there's only so much you can do when your transition from career woman to vamp entails letting your hair down and wearing a diaphanous pink shirt. It's a shame there's no chemistry between her and her male co-stars, but looking at them it's hardly a surprise.

Jesse Eisenberg makes the best of a bad role as nerdy Jimmy, giving his lines real gusto and occasionally managing to make a comedy silk purse out of a sow's ear. However, he's too muscular to convince as a bookworm and too average-looking to pull off heartthrob status. Jowly Joshua Jackson attempts brooding as bearded boyfriend Jake and entirely fails. I'll never understand where the porker's sex symbol image comes from; he's inexpressive, can't act and even with a beard he looks like a chubby twelve year-old. "Smallville's" Michael Rosenbaum is wasted in a badly underwritten lovelorn sidekick role. You can see him dying to strut his stuff but he's chomped before he can get warmed up. Mya and Shannon Elizabethg exist solely as eye-candy werewolf snacks and do little other than look scared and scream. Milo Ventimiglia has fun as the school bully with a secret that I won't disclose here because it would spoil the only decent laugh in the movie. Judy Greer plays her default jealous bitch as Scott Baio's assistant Joanie. And quite what Mr Baio is doing here I'll never know - I just hope he goes back to televisual obscurity very soon.

The two things that generally hold a horror movie together are suspense and decent effects. As there's none of the former in this film, it's down to the effects to bring it up to par. Sadly Craven has gone for the lowest grade physical effects known to man, which means that we get lumbered with a crappy werewolf costume/puppet, seemingly made of latex and clumpy yak fur (and when will costumiers learn that yak fur always looks like yak fur and isn't a reasonable substitute for anything else?). It looks like a giant pissed-off Ewok and is about as frightening. As if that wasn't bad enough, the man in the suit runs around like, well, a man in a suit so there isn't even anything creepy about the way it moves. And come the end when the bad guy is dispatched, Craven seems to think that the contents of a couple of magnesium flares makes for a thrilling finale. Then there are the make-up effects that are so bad you can see where the plastic scars have been applied with spirit gum. I suppose at least the wirework used in a wrestling match scene is passable and the stuntmen involved go for it. Then there are the computer-generated effects that look like they were dashed off in somebody's lunch hour. I have nothing against digital effects if they are done well, but here they are of nightmarishly low quality, with no attention to detail, no sense of weight or depth and one of the worst werewolf transformations I have ever seen. The worst offender is the transformation of Jimmy's dog from cuddly golden retriever to slavering hellbeast. The result is a kind of fanged bathmat with added dribble that lollops about in deeply unconvincing fashion.

The lack of imagination extends to the soundtrack that has "Bowling for Soup" opening the film with a cruddy rock tune called "L'il Red Riding Hood", just in case you hadn't realised it was a werewolf movie. Then there's a veritable smorgasbord of thumping rock and lame rap and an end credits number that incorporates the lyric "woo-ooh" on an alarmingly frequent basis. Even the score isn't original, with Craven referencing himself by using Marco Beltrami's music from "Scream 2" in combination with desperately mediocre high-pitched strings from Tom Hiel and Marcus Trumpp.

This is a film that disappoints on every level and is indicative of how little imagination there is left in Hollywood. It is neither scary nor funny, and is certainly not as clever as it thinks it is. It is let down by a poor script, lame direction, awful special effects and a total lack of suspense. If you want to watch 80s' style horror, go for the real thing and hire Sam Raimi's "Evil Dead". If you're an aspiring horror director, this is worth seeing just so you know how it shouldn't be done. But overall this is a film that will only appeal to Wes Craven completists or those who think "An American Werewolf in London" is too scary. You'll be cursing yourself if you spend money on this at the cinema.
 

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