Originally published March 9, 2005
Cursed
Director: Wes Craven
Writer: Kevin Williamson
Producers: Kevin Williamson, Marianne Maddalena
Stars: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Judy Greer, Shannon Elizabeth, Mya, Kristina Anapau, Portia DiRossi, Milo Ventimiglia
For over a generation, two minutes of film have hung in judgment over the entire horror sub-genre of werewolf movies. I’m talking about the famous “transformation” scene in An American Werewolf in London where David Naughton, with clever cuts and masterful makeup, turned quite agonizingly into a werewolf before our very eyes.
A jaded modern audience might sniff and say the scene is “less realistic” than what you could achieve today. Setting aside the silly ironies in arguing what makes one werewolf transformation more “realistic” than another, I submit that it’s more convincing and entertaining to me than anything done via computer in Cursed. Muscles bulge and ripple and eyes darken and fingernails thicken in Wes Craven’s thriller, and it’s all very busy and expensive-looking, but nothing of it really provides me any gut-level feeling that a physical body is being wrenched quite against its will into a different, more savage form. That is what makes werewolves scary, and without it, you don’t have much of a scary movie.
Instead we have a bland stalking-monster story with another worn-out guess-who-the-bad-guy-is! multiple red-herring climax. Disappointing for an almost name-by-name reunion of the filmmaking talents that brought us Scream, but Cursed feels like a faded relic, the last gasp of an approach to horror that already had its day.
Ellie and Jimmy (Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg) are a young brother and sister struggling to fend for themselves after losing their parents. Ellie’s a producer on the Late Late Show, still hosted by Craig Kilborn back when this movie’s long and troubled production began. Jimmy’s in high school, unpopular, taunted by jocks and unrequited in his puppy love for the head cheerleader (Kristina Anapau). Ellie, meanwhile, is unsure whether her studly club promoter boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson) is ready for a real commitment.
Things start to change awfully quickly one full-mooned night when brother and sister get into a car accident out on a dark stretch of Mulholland Drive in the hills. They nearly rescue the car’s other occupant (Shannon Elizabeth), but then something very unfortunate happens involving a loud and hairy beast.
From then on, both find themselves craving raw meat, and enjoying heightened senses and sex appeal. Jimmy’s wound also seems to cause him to buy designer clothes and start gelling his hair. For awhile, having “the Mark of the Beast” is a positive experience for him, helping him stick up for himself at school. But this is a Wes Craven movie, after all, it’s not about to go Teen Wolf on us.
The original wolf is out busily stalking and eviscerating, while Ellie and Jimmy are progressing further down the road towards metamorphosis, and from here the plot clunks along like any non-supernatural serial killer thriller, eliminating and creating suspects for as long as it thinks it can hold your attention.
There are only a couple of moments where Cursed transcends its low expectations of itself and shows the kind of bloody cheek of Craven and writer/producer Kevin Williamson’s previous collaborations. At one point a school bully/victim relationship evolves to an amusing conclusion by, for lack of a better description, calling its own bluff. And then there is the moment of a most unexpected rude gesture.
The rest of the time it just seems exhausted with itself – like the hyper-articulate pop-sensible teens of Scream and Dawson’s Creek have grow up, gotten jobs and aren’t too much fun anymore. Their navel-gazing has lost its pubescent import and their libido trucks along more out of habit than anything else. Where once Jimmy’s drive to study up on werewolves might have led to some funny experimentation or video store chic, now he just punches a few buttons on the Internet and we have the rules for this particular movie – what silver does, what’s the importance of the full moon, and blah, blah, blah…
Craven hasn’t lost his instinct for milking tension in ordinary life settings – he’s still got enough game to make the act of pushing open a bathroom stall door nail-biting. He’s neutered, though, by a studio-imposed PG-13 re-cut. There are two parts to a really good splatter scare – the build-up where you work yourself into a lather wondering what horrible thing is going to happen, and the payoff, where something even worse happens. With those visceral punchlines yanked from his arsenal at the last minute, it’s too late to go back and make a more suggestive thrill machine a la Jaws or Alien, and what’s left is so much mush.
Rick Baker, the makeup legend behind that transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London, is credited here as well and it’s shocking – what we see of the beast has none of the edge or imagination I expect from his work. Not since Harry and the Hendersons has so much of a big studio movie centered around a guy in a ratty fur suit.
As for the digital work – I pray for the day the bloom comes off and people accept that when it is really obvious digital work, it’s just as distancing as being able to see the fishing wire. It is just one technique in the effects designer’s arsenal, and has no more inherent pizzazz. As it has always been, it is up to the storytellers to provide a hell of a moment and a performer to make it emotionally-relatable. At best, effects can help an already good scene move up that one extra notch. Collectively, Cursed forgot that lesson.