Director: Wes Craven (Nightmare on Elm Street; The Hills Have Eyes; The Serpent and the Rainbow)
Written by: Kevin Williamson (Scream 1, 2 & 3; I Know What You Did Last Summer; Dawson's Creek)
Starring: Joshua Jackson (Free Willy; The Skulls; Dawson's Creek; Fringe), Christina Ricci (The Addams Family; Monster; Penelope) Portia de Rossi (Stigmata; Scream 2; Ellen Degeneres' wife); Shannon Elizabeth (American Pie; Tomcats; 13 Ghosts); and for no apparent reason, Craig Kilborn & Scott Baio.
IMDB user rating: 4.8 out of 10 stars.
Favorite Line: Sorry...it's all crap in this one...a little boring (no surprise here...look who wrote it)
Favorite Scene: Christina Ricci locks the hell out of her front door, but leaves her first floor window wide open...very effective.
Okay, is it sacrilegious to rip on a film made by someone you've been a fan of for a long time? Maybe...but I'm gonna do it anyway. You know how some artists' work gets better over time, with each movie, song or book they come out with making the ones before it seems sophomoric? Well, it seems like Wes Craven's quality of work is going down the toilet. Unless the new Nightmare movie kicks serious ass, I might have to write him off. With Cursed, it's like he's phoning it in...just like Kid Rock's music...it's bland and predictable. But I thought "What the hell? There's a full moon outside, I'll watch a werewolf movie tonight."
The opening scene is typically Cravenesque: Two slutty girls at a carnival (Shannon Elizabeth & Mya--who has REALLY ugly feet) get their palms read by a sexy medium (Portia de Rossi) who tells them to beware...blood is coming. Flip to a nerdy kid who loses his dog, and the girl he's secretly in love with (it's painfully obvious to everybody but her...seen it!) catches the dog for him. The girl's latently gay, homophobic bully boyfriend and his cronies show up just in time (in the homophobe's Z-28, no less) to terrorize this kid (something that happens REPEATEDLY throughout the movie). Meanwhile, Christina Ricci meets up with her boyfriend (Joshua Jackson) at his club, Tinsel, that's set to open in a few days. Tinsel is a Hollywood themed nightclub, in Hollywood (very brave...they even rip on Planet Hollywood a little), with dioramas from classic horror films (you can see Freddy Kruger in the background, but always out of focus). Joshua is very busy, but still has time to tell Christina that he needs some space "I just wanna crawl into bed for three days", he says...to which she totally agrees...but he's not buying. Does Joshua Jackson have to be a douchy prick in everything? Flip to Ellie (Christina Ricci, who frankly peaked as Wednesday Addams, in my opinion) picking up her geeky kid with the dog (her brother). They live on Mulholland Drive (boooring...been there, done that), and in the course of all the twists and turns that imfamous road provides, they hit a mysterious animal, then a car, then a tree. The car they hit rolls down an embankment, and when they get out to help, it's Shannon Elizabeth (she should die in the first half hour of every movie she's in...she sucks), who's stuck in the car, upside down. Just as they free her legs from the steering wheel and the rest of her from the seatbelt, she gets grabbed by a beast that not only drags her out of the car, but Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg...Christina Ricci's brother) as well (he grabs her by the ankles), and Ellie (who grabs Jimmy by the ankles). At this point, my girlfriend (who graciously puts up with this obsession of mine) turns to me and says, "Something big enough to drag three people through the woods? Fuck that, I'd be outta there." Very true. And with those three vignettes, Craven has set us up for two hours worth of cinematic excrement.
From there, it's Melrose Place meets Teen Wolf for an hour and a half. Joshua Jackson (who's actually not half bad in Fringe) plays the part of the mysterious, aloof douchebag he's been pigeonholed into and perfected over his career. Christina Ricci is a bug eyed P.A. for Craig Kilborn who overextends the "innocent turned wicked girl" yet again; Scott Baio is embarrassing as always; Shannon Elizabeth is a moron; and the girl who plays Joanie (she's Scott Baio's publicist...get it? Joanie Loves Chachi...or however you spell it) sucked worse than anything she's ever been in...which is a stretch. Portia de Rossi isn't bad, but she only has two scenes, so I'm sure with enough time, she would've sucked, too. The only believable character is Jimmy, played by Jesse Eisenberg, who was in Zombieland (they're making a Zombieland 2), The Village & The Squid & the Whale, to name a few. He plays the nerdy victim turned stud muffin--albeit a little Toby McGuire as Peter Parkeresque--to the letter. Very entertaining.
The premise is a 3 on the crap-o-meter. Ellie and Jimmy are both infected by the werewolf & begin to feel the effects over the next few days, including the "mark of the beast" on their palm, which looks like five blisters in a circle..but wait! Trace over them with a sharpie, and you've got yourself a pentagram! Both of them are bullied at school & at work, but that changes the more lycan they become. They decide to hunt down and kill the beast that turned them into what they presently are, based on the internet & book research Jimmy does on the subject...but here's where it gets a bit muddy, because other than silver, they use vampire rules...and a zombie rule or two...separate head from heart, etc.--to kill the werewolves. Turns out, the werewolves are Johshua Jackson and Joanie the publicist. He's the original, and infected her with the lycanthropic curse through--get this--sexual transmission. "I guess there's no such thing as safe sex anymore", Joanie says. Please...don't tell me lycanthropic jizz is strong enough to penetrate a Trojan. She's killing all the women he's been with--and are still into him (werewolves have inexpicably strong sex appeal) in order to be the alpha female (they are wolves, you know). There are some predicable "BOO" moments, some Cravenian twists and turns, and a shitload of shitty acting, homophobia, and machismo. The C.G. is weak, the gore is almost non-existent and unbelievable, and the ending is PRE-DICT-A-BLE!
The climax happens at the club opening, where Joanie reveals herself as the killer werewolf, hell bent on taking Ellie out. There's a big fight scene, and when the cops show up, the she-wolf disappears into the wings. That is, until the cops ask for a discription, to which Ellie replies, "she's got a bony ass" among a few other nasty things. Well, Joanie won't take that...and she comes out to attack yet again. The cops shoot her a bunch of times...there's a King Kong homage scene, as she gasps then falls to the ground...seemingly dead. "All clear!" the head cop says...but NO! Joanie jumps back up and BLAMMO! The head cop puts a slug in her brain. "That would definitely qualify as head separated from heart...brains all over the floor", Jimmy says. "Like I said, ALL CLEAR! Get these people outta here!" says the head cop...hands on hips and everything.
Ellie and Jimmy head home, but notice that the mark of the beast is still on their hands. Enter Joshua Jackson to explain that you have to kill the original to end the curse (again, isn't that vampire rules?). "But you can't kill me, and I have to kill Jimmy...there's only room for one alpha male". Huge struggle, Jimmy walks on the ceiling, and Ellie ultimately stabs Joshua with a sterling silver wedding cake spatula. He ultimately catches fire (vampire rules! werewolves don't burn, dammit) and all is well. Yawn.
Okay. I've seen worse...and I've seen much, much better. Wes Craven is definitely better than this; it's almost like he and Scott Baio went on The Craig Kilborn Show and said to one another, "Hey, we should all do a movie together!" Either way, this is a snooze fest. Boring gore, no nudity, and Mya's ugly ass feet. Don't bother. But like always, check out the trailer: Wes Craven's Cursed.
The problem with this film is that it was created to be so much darker and violent than it ended up being, because the studio completely attacked it. Check out the pitifully ignored 'Bad Moon' from 1996 instead. Wes Craven only seems good as a producer today for some things that work ('They', 'The Breed'), otherwise he's pretty spent, but 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' from 1984 was a complete wimp-out anyway-more like a kid's cartoon, the 18 cert is a joke. Everyone sleepwalked their performances through it, the dialogue was equally sleepy, it's like the entire cats and crew really WERE being kept from their beds, but not by a stupid OAP with bad skin in a stinky red and black granny jumper with kitchen knives laced into his gloves. And what a bad ending it had-a giant doll pulled through a tiny hole in the door, and worse, it didn't even tackle the paeodophile angle, which was the whole point. The remake could only be better, at least they tried to feature it. But Craven was never a stalwart of horror, the one with the most varied amount of good work remains Stuart Gordon.
ReplyDeleteCraven's best films remain 'The Hills Have Eyes', 'The People Under The Stairs' and the first two 'Screams' in the horror canon, but as thriller 'Red Eye' was so good, maybe he should leave horror entirely-it's certainly left him.
Vampire and werewolf rules follow each other closely-of course you can burn werewolves, you've seen 'The Howling', right? The zombie thing means nothing as always. Fire kills most horror beings, surely a horror fan like you's seen enough endings, but of course it conveniently (and stupidly) never works on human boring being serial killers for no other reason than 'Halloween' seems to be the template for how to be annoying forever as far as slasher ends go and that sequels ALWAYS have to come from them. Or everything these days.
Like the slasher 'Valentine', this could have been allowed to go in a good direction, but the studio killed almost all the fun and promise. Mind you, it'll never be as bad as 'The Village', 'Last Exorcism', 'Saw 3', Paranormal Activity', 'Dead End', 'Sinister' any "zombie" or asbo brat film beyond 'Outlaw'-and even those 'Ginger Snaps' sequels we didn't need nor want. But Craven is pretty much done-as are we.