Cursed (2004)

In the aftermath of a car crash, brother and sister Jimmy and Ellie (Jesse Eisenberg and Christina Ricci) are bitten by a werewolf.  When they begin to exhibit increased abilities, they know they must find the creature that bit them.

Cursed is half of a good film, cut into pieces, placed out of order, mixed with clichés and weak jokes, and topped with a bad mystery.  As it was shot, shutdown, rewritten, fifty percent re-shot with a partially changed cast, and then edited from an R to a PG-13, it’s no surprise that it’s a patchwork.

Apparently, this project never had a firm vision.  Wes Craven shoots it like a slasher (using a low POV as a victim slowly walks to her car, stopping at noises, etc.).  I have no idea what writer Kevin Williamson had in mind; nothing on screen gives a clue.

Some of the tried-and-true is amusing.  Bowing to 1941’s The Wolf Man, a club contains both a statue of Larry Talbot and a copy of his silver walking stick.  There’s also a fortune teller to pronounce doom on the first victims, inexplicably portrayed by Portia de Rossi, though due to the muddled script, she wanders off at the halfway mark and is never seen again.

But most of the too-familiar scenes aren’t homages to earlier films, but sad clichés that Craven should know to avoid.  Some are just silly, such as an Internet search on “L.A. wolves” that pops up a true life werewolf FAQ (try the search; you’ll end up on sports team sites long before you see a lycanthrope).  There’s also the easy to attain tome of absolutely accurate monster info.  Where do film characters find these books? Since this is, in part, a high school film, there has to be the bully (who has no resemblance to actual violent teens) who deep down is good and our young hero has to beat him at a sporting event.  This leads to a scene that proves that neither Craven nor Williamson know what a high school is.  The competition takes place at some kind of otherworld wrestling practice where there are not only spectators, but cheerleaders.  The coach takes the bully’s word for it that our ex-wimpy wolf-boy wants to wrestle, and sends him right to the mat.  This coach doesn’t intervene when a second bully joins the first in attacking Jimmy (but perhaps this school follows the rules of professional wrestling), nor when a throw looks likely to have caused spinal damage.  Scary school.  The stupidity of the scene is less of a problem than an indication of the haphazard way the story was tossed together.

I wonder if Williamson is trying to point out how stupid Jimmy is, or how stupid he believes the audience is.  Jimmy actually looks at his hand, sees the perfectly placed five points, looks at the pentagram in his werewolf tome, and then gets a marker to connect the dots.  I can almost hear him muttering, “OK idiots in the second row, see how these points form a star.  You probably didn’t know that form just looking at them, but this means I’m a werewolf.”  Sigh.

The multi-year shooting schedule causes Cursed to be dated before it was released.  Ellie works for the Craig Kilborn show, the now canceled Craig Kilborn show.  Ooops. And fans wildly cheer when Lance Bass appears at the club.  Would anyone recognize Lance Bass now?

Red Herrings are forced on the audience.  Why would a character be willing to stop and show his right palm (demonstrating there’s no pentagram), but then argue about showing his left?  Well, he might if the script couldn’t come up with a reasonable way to keep him a suspect.  Too bad anyone watching knows who the werewolf is within a few minutes of the opening.

Now I have a question to the girls out there as this isn’t my world: do girls actually push their way into other girl’s bathroom stall just to check on things?  This is not an event I’d see in a guy’s washroom so I can’t tell if this is more bizarre writing or just one of those things about females I don’t understand.  From my perspective, someone putting effort into shoving open a stall door, particularly when told there was no problem, is odd.  Feel free to correct me.

The werewolf design, makeup, and CGI work, is pretty good, though the werewolf looked a bit like a teddy bear at one point.  The transformation is better than in almost any other werewolf film.  But the monster still looks fake.  Being better than horrible isn’t enough, so why show it?  When only a hand is shown changing, it is believable, so stick to that.  A cartoon wolf, no matter how good, is just a cartoon wolf.

If the movie is sounding pretty bad to you from my review, I haven’t even gotten to the biggest problems.  I won’t explain the worst bit of script incoherence as I’d have to reveal the end of the film.  But I can mention the lack of character development.  Jake is barely a character at all; his connection to the girls, his relationship with Ellie, and his personality all needed to be addressed, but aren’t.  Joshua Jackson just stands there and speaks in a reedy voice.

So where is that good part I mentioned? In the two leads, and mainly in Ricci.  As the normal sister, she is terrible.  But when she’s allowed to be a strange, sexy, wolf-to-be, she’s as good as they get. No one does weird like Ricci.  A liberated, powerful, Ricci-wolf is entertainment.  The middle of the film should have been nothing but Ellie giving her officemates that preternatural stare of hers, and sniffing the air.  As is, seeing Ricci suck on Kilborn’s finger will wash away much of the dreck in this flick.