‘I guess there’s no such thing as safe sex with a werewolf...’
Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson changed horror cinema forever when they released Scream in 1996. The glossy, self-aware teen slashers of the late ’90s they helped popularise were already old hat, however, by the time Craven and Williamson combined again for 2005’s disaster piece Cursed. Never has a film been more fittingly titled…
I won’t insult you by recounting the laughable plot here. Instead, just know that there are a bunch of young, attractive actors who may or may not be werewolves. It really doesn’t matter. BUT. Check out this cast list and tell me that this isn’t the most 2005 cast of all time: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Judy Greer, Portia de Rossi, Shannon Elizabeth, Michael Rosenbaum, Mya and that douche who plays Jess in Gilmore Girls. This film opens with Bowling for Soup performing live at a party. The soundtrack also boasts Dashboard Confessional and Alkaline Trio. We are looking at a land that time forgot.
I should begin by stating that the phrase ‘troubled production’ doesn’t come close to describing what happened behind the scenes of this movie. Dimension Films boss Bob Weinstein ordered extensive reshoots, dropped the rating from an R to a PG-13 and sacked legendary effects artist Rick Baker, the man who created the most iconic werewolf effect ever in An American Werewolf in London, to be replaced by some of the most egregious CGI since The Langoliers. Against this backdrop, it’s impossible to imagine Cursed being anything other than terrible, even with all the talent involved. Williamson’s script is painfully unfunny and totally lacking in the wit and sparkle that made those early Scream films so exciting, Craven’s direction is flat and forgettable (perhaps unsurprisingly, as he didn’t want to do the film in the first place but was persuaded by Dimension to do so), and the cast are all over the place. Ricci, Eisenberg and Jackson seem to be acting in three entirely different movies with entirely different tones, so when their scenes do overlap, it makes for a truly baffling viewer experience.
Cursed is not just a terrible film; it’s barely a film at all. The werewolf myth has inspired plenty of bad entries before, but this one is truly the worst of a bad bunch – a lycanthropic calamity.
