Mark of the Least

Kevin Williamson's "Cursed" is just a steaming pile of not-so-sterling silver. (Film Review)

by Michael Sean McGowan

The Upside: Call it When Lycanthropic Animals Attack!

The Downside: Nothing new under the full moon.

    It's strange the way some people's career can become a contradiction in term.  For example, in 1996 when Wes Craven first teamed up with unknown screenwriter Kevin Williamson to make Scream, what they produced was not only an-out-of-left-field hit at the box office, it even made the stodgy ranks of film critics giddy, too.  And why not- as someone once said, the best way to critique a movie is to make another and Scream was more than just a dead-on lampoon of drive-in-style scream-teen slasher pics, it also seemed to have an energy and freshness that was invigorating. 

    Now, coming down the pipe almost a decade later is the duo's latest collaboration, Cursed, a movie that is just as vapid, unoriginal, and blatantly cheesy as the straight-to-video fodder Scream so effectively parodied.  To be perfectly fair, history suggests that Cursed might be the kind of awful movie that can't really be blamed on anyone.  The story of film's making would make a riveting documentary like the way Lost in La Mancha chronicled Terry Gilliam's defunct Don Quixote move The Man Who Shot Don Quixote.  Both Quixote and Cursed were movies that probably started out as good ideas, but became inflicted with the trials and tribulations of scheduling conflicts and a story that stubbornly would not come together on an almost Biblical level.  The release of Cursed has been delayed for over a year and in that time the screenplay underwent such radical transformations it practically became a whole, different movie from what was first intended.  The need for reshoots and the inability to call back certain actors for them lead to entire parts being recast, which in turn lead to even more reshoots.  And add to this Wes Craven's apparent idea to give Cursed a Robert Altman-like feel by lacing it with a horde of Hollywood cameos completely broke down, with some walk-ins by the likes of Omar Epps and Corey Feldman ending up on the cutting room floor.  There is evidence that like a flailing ship on rough waters all efforts went into saving Cursed even after it reached the point of being un-savable, but the economics of the movies demands that when the ball gets rolling on a picture, it almost always has to be released if only to recoup a small fraction of the money that has been ponied up for it.

    Not that this kind of sympathy can let it off the hook or makes it any more pleasant to sit through.  Frankly, as a horror, I've seen Albert and Costello movies scarier than Cursed.  Despite the apparent meltdown in the creative process, it is still a head-scratcher how anything that sticks so close to the straight, yellow line of cliche could have Kevin Williamson's name on it.  It also doesn't help that Cursed has the rotten luck of being released a week after Constantine, a movie that might not have had the most smarts in its head, but also didn't feel like a greatest hits album of a sub-genre that hasn't seen anything fresh or unique since- well, ever.

    You know we're in trouble when it opens borrowing an idea from The Wolfman and just about every werewolf movie that has followed, a creepy fortune teller spreading tales of doom to her customers, even now if her local is updated to the LA boardwalk and the future Dog Chow candidates are a pair of Southern California hotties, one of whom gets into an "accident" when her car hits an animal on Mulholland Drive.  Stopping to help are Jimmy and Ellie, a brother and sister still reeling from the death of their parents- a subplot that isn't expanded beyond what is needed to have moments of both kids staring at family photos with droopy frowns.  Ellie is a production assistant to the Craig Kilborn Show (!) while Jimmy is a high school misfit, yet retreading a setting that allows us to see how Williamson's dialogue is still waiting to be invited to the senior prom.  Gee- you don't suppose that Ellie is dealing with a conniving professional/romantic rival at work and Jimmy is undergoing continued abuse at the hands of some dodge-ball bullies and that both will gain a spurt of self-confidence and aggressiveness after being bitten by the mysterious creature, do ya?  Why anyone thought this movie needed a psychic in the first place is beyond me.

    The special effects (yet another reason the movie was on the shelf for so long) are serviceable, yet when these snarling hairballs of spit and teeth are completely revealed, they kind of look like rejects from Gorillas in the Mist.  Everything else, though, is on autopilot.  Christina Ricci, who should be more at home in a movie like this, completely phones it in, as does the rest of the cast.  Most grating is Jesse Eisenberg who makes Jimmy little more than a screechy-voiced info-dump, tossing out gobs of werewolf myth and legend at the drop of the hat throughout the film instead of talking the way a normal human being would.  And I've got to ask- when you even have Scott Baio showing up in random scenes looking bored, like what's going on around him isn't worth his time, shouldn't that set off some really serious alarm bells?  Huh?

    Cursed tries to draw its suspense from some pretty dry wells.  The musical score overuses stingers to such a heinous degree you're likely to think a sound tech left a temp track on continual loop.  The storyline is also fairly meatless- random Los Angelinous become werewolf chew toys while Ellie and Jimmy begin to fear they are cursed with the "mark of the beast," a term so overused here it makes Donald Trump's use of "You're fired" seem conservative.  There are the routine twists that anyone who has seen Scream will recognize, but while that movie felt unpredictable, here it just feels coy as we randomly go through the guessing game of who is the master werewolf causing all the mayhem.  At one point I began to fantasize what M. Night Shyamalan, a director who excels at character-driven suspense and generating tension through small movements, could have done with this.

    There is probably one scene, five-minutes worth of one, near the end that does display some of the ironic wit that made Kevin Williamson famous to begin with, but it isn't nearly enough to save, or make me recommend, this travesty.  The last two months have become a dumping ground for the rotting remains of bad creature features- the one gem in the heap, Constantine, wasn't scary, but it was certainly smooth.  Cursed isn't smooth- it isn't original and it isn't even interesting.  It is a footnote for a group of people who have made far better movies and for audiences who will start to forget it before they even throw their popcorn bags away.  D

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