Review
CURSED
Starring Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg and Joshua Jackson
Directed by Wes Craven
Now playing
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The fact that Cursed is the latest horror movie to delve into the werewolf genre isn’t a big deal. What is noteworthy is that it reunites director Wes Craven with screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who made slasher-movie history and rejuvenated the teen-horror genre with Scream.
This time out, the young heartthrobs under attack are the underfed Christina Ricci and the ever-scruffy Joshua Jackson (who made his name on Williamson’s soap opera Dawson’s Creek). As hard as this may be to believe, neither of them are half as credible as Neve Campbell was in Scream. Ricci plays a buttoned-down press assistant to Craig Kilbourne (yup, the film is rife with Hollywood in jokes à la Scream 3, complete with a useless cameo by Scott Baio as himself) who lives alone with her geeky brother (Jesse Eisenberg) after the untimely death of their parents. When their car strikes a wild dog on a deserted stretch of Mullholland Drive, a terrible accident ensues. It’s not long before things go from bad to worse. Shannon Elizabeth (more useless star power) is literally ripped in two and the siblings leave the scene with scrapes and bite marks. Now Ricci has a taste for blood, Eisenberg is waking up naked on his front lawn and there is a vicious oversized dog stalking tall cute women in Hollywood.
The good news is that for a PG-13 rated film, there is way more gore than you might expect. Between the gushing arterial spray, beheadings and dismemberments, you might be lulled into thinking that this is a pretty good little splatter flick. Then the werewolf hits the screen in all its hulking computer-generated glory and anything the Cursed had going for it evaporates. Still, the fact that the wolf doesn’t look as good as the furry fiend in An American Werewolf in London wouldn’t be such a problem if Williamson had taken more time with the script. If he had tried to rework the werewolf mythology instead of haphazardly cobbling together legend and lore into an unsatisfying pseudo-mystery, Cursed would have a bit more bite. For those thinking that this isn’t possible, I suggest checking out the brilliant Ginger Snaps – not only does it have some juicy practical effects, but by making lycanthropy synonymous with puberty, the film is as smart as it is messy.
As it stands, Cursed steals all its best moments from old episodes of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Williamson and Craven make up for a ludicrous storyline by peppering the film with crappy safe-sex allegory and horror-movie references. (Is that Freddy Kruger in the background of that shot? Why, yes, it is. How clever.) What remains is a bad-looking and insipid film that is so predictable I guessed the twist at the end from looking at the poster (no joke). With any luck we won’t have to look forward to Cursed 2: Still Cursed. |
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