Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 24, 2005, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Can a movie be dated the moment it’s released? That’s a question begged by Cursed, and not just because it employs a doom-predicting fortune teller character and asks the audience to take her at face value. The film utilizes the same smart-alecky, ironic tone as director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson’s Scream franchise, an approach that now feels past its prime; indeed, it falls so flat here that it almost makes one wonder how it worked so well the first time around.
Before I go further, I should note that since Dimension didn’t provide any critics’ screenings of the PG-13-rated release version, this review is based on an advance showing of the R-rated cut (fully completed, with titles, FX and music) that the Fango staff attended. I’d feel a little bad about this if it weren’t for the fact that about 95 percent of the attendees at that preview were general-audience people, clearly intended to spread word of mouth on the movie. Some of the R version’s gore was pretty extreme, so it can only be speculated how the softened versions of these scenes will play; what can be said is that showing a packed house the uncut edition, in the service of building buzz for a movie the studio already intended to send to theaters in toned-down form, is a form of duplicity more distressing than anything in Cursed itself.
In one way, trimming Cursed for younger-audience access actually makes sense, since the only people likely to appreciate it are 12-year-olds who have never seen a werewolf movie before. It’s rather remarkable that a film made in this day and age, by talented people who have demonstrated a genre-subverting skill in the past, could possess no new ideas about lycanthropy. Cursed touches on the monstrous-empowerment themes of The Howling and Ginger Snaps (any 10 minutes of which wipe the floor with this movie), borrows bits from An American Werewolf in London and references the original Wolf Man with a few onscreen props, yet its own approach to the subject feels uncommitted and half-hearted—no doubt a symptom of the movie’s famously troubled production history.
The big question surrounding the experience of watching Cursed, in fact, is how uneven it feels given all the reshooting it underwent. The answer is that it doesn’t, at least not in the expected manner; since about 90 percent of the movie was scripted and filmed all over again after principal photography had nearly been completed, mismatching footage isn’t really an issue. But the finished product suggests that Williamson wrote his new screenplay in a big hurry; it plays like a first draft, with story concepts only partway developed and an excess of repetitive, explanatory dialogue. And it’s abundantly clear that Craven’s heart just wasn’t in the project once he was forced to do it a second time; there are a couple of nice stylistic flourishes, but for the most part there’s the sense that he was just rolling film to get it over with. Cursed has plenty of polished surfaces, but it never gets under the skin—of its characters or the viewer.
Oh yes, the plot: Siblings Ellie (Christina Ricci) and Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) are driving through the Hollywood Hills when they run into something large and hairy, causing an accident before the large, hairy thing winds up wounding both Ellie and Jimmy. (I Know Who You Bit Last Summer?) The “curse” begins to affect the two in the expected ways: They develop a taste for raw meat, Ellie has predatory nightmares and acquires a newfound sexuality and Jimmy, a target of bullies at his high school, kicks the ass of jock Bo (Milo Ventimiglia) in a wrestling match. (There is a funny payoff to Bo’s character, though the idea isn’t taken as far, dramatically or metaphorically, as it could have been.)
Meanwhile, the likes of Shannon Elizabeth, Mya, Craig Kilborn and Scott Baio turn up as token celebrity victims and/or pop-culture touchstones, and a large percentage of the supporting cast are set up as potential suspects. The resolution of the whoisit borrows a page from Scream, while at the climax, the movie all but forgets that it’s about werewolves. The villain chooses to stay human rather than turn lupine to attack, while Ellie and Jimmy apparently lose the strength they’d gained from the “curse,” yet still prefer to use fisticuffs or jump on their attacker’s back even when a monster-killing weapon is at close hand.
Much was made of Rick Baker’s involvement in the initial monster designs, which KNB EFX significantly retooled for the final movie—yet for all their work, the result is a pretty basic, albeit well-executed, big shaggy upright-walking critter with a ferocious wolf’s head. The gore FX are more than up to snuff—not like anyone will get a good look at them, at least perhaps until the DVD—but the transformations are presented through CGI that will only remind fans of this subgenre how much better such scenes look when done with animatronics. And that’s symptomatic of Cursed as a whole, a movie that celebrates slickness instead of the visceral, that finds a one-time maverick filmmaker submerged in a project beholden to commercial concerns. By the end, when the werewolf flips the bird at a group of pursuers, genre diehards in the audience might find themselves taking the gesture personally.
