Movie Review: Cursed

Cursed (2005)

Directed by Wes Craven 

Written by Kevin Williamson

Starring Christina Ricci, Josh Jackson, Jesse Eisenberg, Scott Baio, Judy Greer, Shannon Elizabeth

Release Date February 25th, 2005 

Published February 24th, 2005

As far as career low points go I would have thought Director Wes Craven could not go any lower than his sad and long forgotten Eddie Murphy vampire flick Vampire In Brooklyn. However after seeing Mr. Craven's new werewolf picture Cursed I find that even if you have previously dug to the bottom of the barrel you can always lift the barrel to go a little lower.

Cursed is a shameful example of a once great Director in his most faded glory. In attempting to recreate the past success of the Scream series Craven has crafted a woefully inept spectacle of bad special effects and reteamed with writer Kevin Williamson, a return to the kind of in-the-know humor that made Scream hip.... in '96.

Christina Ricci stars as Elly, a TV producer raising her little brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) after the death of their parents. When the kids are involved in a car accident, they are attacked by some kind of beast that annihilates another woman (Shannon Elizabeth, in a cameo nod to Drew Barrymore in Scream). Jimmy claims the beast was a werewolf and the cops and his sister are unsurprisingly skeptical.

Jimmy becomes obsessed with werewolf lore, because someone in werewolf movies has to provide exposition, spending hours researching the side effects of a non-fatal werewolf attack. Naturally there is the moonlight thing, an aversion to silver and a heightened sense of smell especially when it comes to blood. Soon both brother and sister are showing some supernatural side effects and only killing the wolf that attacked them can save them from a lifetime of moonlight killing.

Josh Jackson plays Elly's boyfriend who has a dark secret of his own and Judy Greer (The Village) plays a bitchy rival to Elly in her job as a producer on the Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn. The cast also boasts cameos by Kilborn, Lance Bass of N'Sync, pop star Mya and Scott Baio (Yes, Scott Baio).

Memo to Kevin Williamson, simply putting Scott Baio in your movie is not funny. Give him something funny to do or say or don't do it at all. Mr. Baio's cameo is a throwaway, amongst many throwaway jokes that fall flat throughout Cursed.

The screenplay by Kevin Williamson attempts to mine comedy from Elly's gig as a producer on the Kilborn show but with Kilborn having left since the film wrapped more than a year ago, the comedy is embarassingly stale. Williamson also attempts to revive the running gags from the Scream series with Shannon Elizabeth's brief cameo and quick death and of course that knowing ironic horror movie humor that was his forte more than 10 years ago but has failed to mature much in the same way Mr. Williamson's career has failed to mature toward the success so many expected for him after the twin hits Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer.

It's not just the humor that falls flat in Cursed but also the career of the once very promising Christina Ricci. After her Prozac Nation was shelved before being dumped to cable and forgotten, it seems Ms. Ricci is longing for the kind of paycheck an actor can only get when they compromise their talent. Cursed however is not merely a compromise.  It's a total sellout. Never before has Ricci been so lifeless and banal on screen.

Ms. Ricci is not alone in the sellout department. It seems everyone from former Dawson's Creek star Johua Jackson to pop star Mya to the lovely Judi Greer were all willing to throw actorly credibility to the wind to gather a paycheck. Only Greer's performance could be called memorable, but not memorable for the right reasons. Ms. Greer's performance is so embarrassing she may want to leave it off her resume in the future.

The CGI effects employed in Cursed to bring the various werewolves to life are seemingly what Ed Wood might have created had he the chance to use the technology. All of the films werewolves are bad cartoons and because of the restrictive PG-13 Rating the film cannot distract the audience from the terrible effects with blood and gore. PG-13 simply does not suit the man who arguably has spilled more cinematic blood in history than any other director. The film's rating and lack of old school blood and guts is clearly a box office related compromise between Craven and the studio Dimension Films.

Not that an R-Rating could have done much for what is the worst outing of Wes Craven's long career. The master of horror delivers a movie with a thuddingly uninteresting script, little to no real scares and CGI effects, never his strong suit, that are some of the worst I have seen in a long while. Cursed plays not like a Wes Craven movie but rather like one of those early 2000's movies that he simply slapped his name on like They or Dracula 2000: bad, low-budget horror that capitalizes off the name of the man once called the Master of Horror. That name has lost a great deal of its cache with Cursed, one of the worst films of the 2004.