Cursed: Frank's Take
01/04/2005 . Source: Frank Ochieng 

Well, this absurd horror movie’s title says it all, folks. Cursed is a rancid boofest that wouldn’t scare a claustrophobic out of a dark and dank cave. It’s hard to believe that veteran fear-monger Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street) and resourceful screenwriter Kevin Williamsom (Scream) couldn’t come up with an inspired creepy collaboration given their previous capable track records working together.

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Cursed (2005) Dimension Films
1 hour 26 minutes.
Starring: Christina Ricci, Michael Rosenbaum, Shannon Elizabeth, Jesse Eisenberg, Bambi Allen, Scott Baio, James Brolin, Scott Foley, Portia De Rossi, Joshua Jackson, Judy Greer. Directed by: Wes Craven.

Well, this absurd horror movie’s title says it all, folks. Cursed is a rancid boofest that wouldn’t scare a claustrophobic out of a dark and dank cave. It’s hard to believe that veteran fear-monger Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street) and resourceful screenwriter Kevin Williamsom (Scream) couldn’t come up with an inspired creepy collaboration given their previous capable track records working together.

Instead, Cursed amounts to a generic and uninvolved goosebump thriller that has all the intriguing impact of a decaying tooth. If anything, Craven’s twitchy werewolf narrative just proves that the horror genre is just as uneventful as ever in the way it haphazardly challenges the conventions of a decent hair-raising spectacle.

There was a time when Craven and Williamson craftily redefined the construction of horror flicks by effectively skewering them in original, offbeat fashion. Now with this latest flaccid frightfest in Cursed, the terror-inducing tandem have become uncharacteristically insignificant with the ridiculing efforts they put forth in this sagging suspense piece. Surprisingly, this perfunctory project is devoid of anything fabulously giddy or gross that would make the average hedonistic horror fan blink with mild enthusiasm.

The casting has a potent mixture of past and present personalities and with Craven and Williamson at the helm the possibilities were endless. But Cursed squanders its potential with idiotic chilling flourishes that wouldn’t upstage a Halloween mask. Somehow Craven’s wooden direction cripples this pseudo-sensationalistic venture. Plus, Williamson’s handle on the youthful element that he loves to spotlight in his tingling fear flicks doesn’t have the exhilarating thrust it used to when he made a resounding splash with the Scream franchise years ago. Reportedly, Cursed had gone through some mighty hectic changes with re-shoots after re-shoots over the course of the year it was feverishly worked on. The final result, sad to say, hasn’t resolved any prior tinkering with this shoddy shocker.

Christina Ricci is the pretty pixie that headlines this fettered fable about rabid werewolves. Ricci plays a young producer named Ellie who toils for television’s Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn (yes, Kilborn actually appears as himself). When poor Ellie isn’t being subjected to the professional demands of insufferable Kilborn then she’s tackling the pressures of raising her troubled teenaged brother Jimmy (Roger Dodger’s Jessie Eisenberg). Since Ellie’s parents are deceased she had no choice but to act as a surrogate mother to her geeky sibling. Plus, Ellie is applying the pressure on her boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson) to take their relationship seriously. It’s safe to say that Ellie is one complex twenty-something woman with a lot on her mind.

Things become more chaotic for Ellie when she and Jimmy are traveling down L.A.’s famed Mulholland Drive one late evening. As it turns out, a leaping wolf attacks them while driving thus causing the twosome to crash into another car being driven by unsuspecting victim Becky (Shannon Elizabeth). While the sister-brother team tries to pull Becky away from the carnage, the wolf reappears and snatches the helpless woman from the mangled vehicle. Before the creature disappears into the night with Becky it manages to scratch both Ellie and Jimmy in the process.

It is not long after the raging encounter with this beast that Ellie and Jimmy start to experience some peculiar changes in their mental and physical behavior. Their instincts and senses are heightened through an inexplicable means that makes them strangely invincible. The once defeated twosome of Ellie and Jimmy now feel relentlessly empowered as they no longer trudge through life feeling deprived. Still, Ellie realizes that she may be a marked target for the wolf to return and finish the business it started when initially confronting her on that hostile night.

As Ellie and Jimmy deal with the burden of their bizarre predicament, the werewolf that devoured Becky has been stalking more fresh human meat throughout the seedy streets of Hollywood. Ellie realizes that she may be instrumental in trying to prevent this horrifying hairball from wreaking further havoc on random innocent bystanders. And if that’s a handful to consider Ellie must also figure out how to unravel the dreaded curse that beleaguers her and Jimmy.

As wretched and moronic as Cursed may be in its misplaced cynical and satirical mode, it manages to scrap up a couple of formidable tension-filled scenes worth cringing over. For instance, the bone-chilling sequence featuring pop singing sensation Mya being stalked by a werewolf in a parking garage is genuinely haunting yet twisted in its unintentional hilarity. Basically, Cursed comes off as a Scream copycat with fangs. The notion that literal vampires are comparable to the other types of figurative bloodsuckers that roam the Tinseltown landscape and tap the soul out of its hapless on-lookers is inherently comical. Unfortunately for Craven and company there aren’t many similar moments that are strung together to elevate this werewolf yarn beyond the meager yet boisterous boundaries.

The wry message pertaining to young people as sacrificial lambs in today’s saturated market of expectations could have been an ideal symbolism that worked. However, Cursed is a bland morbid mystery vehicle that thinks it is slicker than what it really is in nature. The movie’s gimmick extends to figuring out who the alpha werewolf is among the pack. Is it the aforementioned commitment-dodging love interest in Ellie’s Jake? How about Jimmy’s gay-bashing classmate (played by TV’s Gilmore Girls supporting cast member Milo Ventimiglia)? Maybe it’s the finger-pointing fortune teller (Portia De Rossi from TV’s Arrested Development)? Could it be Ellie’s annoying late night talk show publicist (Judy Greer) that’s the menacing missing link?

The movie does what it can to muster up its manufactured energy but falls short of its ghoulish goals. The CGI werewolves and other special effects acknowledgements are curiously murky and meandering. The script is woefully derivative and the dialogue is flippantly lame. Craven does provide some bursts of horror-making violence on occasion to keep the audience on its weary toes but it is not enough to compensate for the lagging story. The drawn-out characterizations are not as vibrant and adventurous as one might imagine. In reference to Ricci and Eisenberg, their take as inflicted sibs with overwhelming spells isn’t convincing because they never do anything special to exploit the odd gift of powers thrust upon them. And taking on the arbitrary cameos by the likes of ex-gabmeister Craig Kilborn (who should have stayed on his now-defunct late night talk show), Lance Bass and Scott Baio seem so desperately shameless.

It’s clear to see why the sensitive suits at Dimension Films didn’t want to allow the press to screen Cursed ahead of time for fear of such critical backlash. Oh well, when you spot a skunk one must assume that it’s automatically smelly. Undoubtedly, macabre masterminds Craven and Williamson are responsible for this current unpleasant whiff that makes Teen Wolf look like An American Werewolf in London.

Fittingly, this is one withering werewolf saga that certainly bites the dust!

Frank Ochieng

(c) Frank Ochieng 2005