Cursed (2005)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Admirable film.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Wes Craven's Cursed is a film that would've been embraced had it been made in the mid-1990's, but because of its inception in the early-to-mid 2000's, it became, in itself, a cursed production. In the 1990's, horror films were a dime-a-dozen, and as there were incredible amounts of slasher films falling into theaters in the 1980's, the direct-to-video market became saturated with a plethora of low-budget features. Killer snowmen, killer gingerbread man, parodies, stalker films, and werewolf horror films lined video store shelves and studios were taking just about any asinine idea for a horror film and running with it. In the early aughts, however, this direct-to-video output slowed and horror became a lessened commodity. There were enough franchises to continue, crossover, and further develop and those are the franchises (Jason X, Freddy vs. Jason, Leprechaun, Child's Play) that got the theatrical/mainstream treatment.Almost any horror film released in the mid-to-late 2000's was forced to be cut from an R-rated film to a PG-13 rating, in an act of optimism by studios to snag the high school crowd on a Friday night. Such films like Prom Night and When a Stranger Calls, remakes of gritty slashers in the 1970's and 1980's, were watered down significantly to bear a PG-13 rating. Wes Craven, despite giving the horror industry one of its most successful franchises and characters the genre has ever seen, on top of a plethora of other films, found Cursed, one of his rarer, more contemporary productions, victim to reshoots, casting difficulties, a slew of production drama, and script-rewrites. What was going to be a more evident revitalization of Scream and teen horror turned into a bargain bin werewolf film that is narratively and visually crippled by a PG-13 rating.And, despite all the problems this film faced and the messiness of the end product, Cursed is perplexingly fun and passable as a piece of teen horror. We focus on brother and sister Ellie and Jimmy Myers (Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg), who experience a series of strange events after hitting a mysterious animal and crashing their vehicle into another car on a highway late at night. After the victim in the other vehicle gets mauled by the mysterious, wolf-like animal, Ellie and Jimmy find themselves experiencing a wide variety of bizarre behaviors, such as increased sense of smell, Pentagram-shaped sores on their hands, appetites for blood, allergies to silver, and others, leading them, particularly Jimmy, to believe they are turning into werewolves. With other colleagues of them exhibiting strange behaviors in addition, it could also be a sweeping epidemic that is slowly taking over the local teenage population.Cursed is less a straight-forward film and more a series of quirky vignettes in which increasingly strange things happen to certain characters. In one scene, Ellie has a complete meltdown in the bathroom of her workplace, resulting in red eyes, bloody hands resembling claws, and a distinct satisfaction at the sight, smell, and taste of blood. Jimmy, on the other hand, is bullied by the homophobic wrestling jock Bo (Milo Ventimiglia), who consistently pesters him to join the team so he can face off and ostensibly defeat Jimmy, further humiliating him. It isn't until Jimmy gains these unprecedented abilities that he puts Bo and his band of jocks to shame.Cursed often seems like Scream without the genre-parody aspect and the humor, and screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who worked on much of the Scream franchise with Craven, seems to be trying to give teens that same sense of ribald fun that he did with the original films. To Williamson's credit, the film works because it keeps the viewer interested at the transformation the two leads are constantly undergoing and the characters on display are developed a bit more than your run-of-the-mill film. The error here is that the film is handcuffed in asserting itself in terms of its scares and its display of horror because the violence is so muted. Even the dialog - which I'm told is modified in addition to some of the events of the film in the much-discussed "unrated cut" as opposed to the PG-13/theatrical cut I watched - seems modified greatly at the last minute, as if the characters are walking on eggshells and picking and choosing their words carefully. With that, it's also interesting to note how, despite Dimension Films and Miramax keeping this film as muted and mild as possible, they let the recurring gay subtext and theme in the film carry through much of the central storyarch.At the end of it all, as messy as the final product can be and as underwhelming as it occasionally feels, Cursed is one of the more enjoyable horror films of this time, squeezing itself next to When a Stranger Calls in the category of satisfying PG-13 horror films. Craven doesn't find his trademark genre-inventiveness, mainly because no matter how much he pretends, he's still spelunking through charted territory, but you get the sense that having Williamson hold the pen again makes this project feel like a spin off of Scream for him. The fun and thrills are present despite the occasional shortcomings, which is enough for me to shrug and simply wink at you, dear reader, when it comes to recommending this film.Starring: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Judy Greer, and Milo Ventimiglia. Directed by: Wes Craven.

Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Milo Ventimiglia, Judy Greer and Shannon Elizabeth star in Wes Craven's 2005 horror film. This takes place in L.A. where we meet young woman, Ellie (Ricci) and her brother, Jimmy (Eisenberg) who are heading home and get into a car accident due to a werewolf. They try to help a young woman, Becky (Elizabeth) whose car they hit and she gets brutally slaughtered by the beast while they're scratched/bit by it. Soon, Ellie and Jimmy start to feel different and learn they have inherited a werewolf curse. Jackson (Urban Legend) plays Ellie's mysterious boyfriend, Jake, Ventimiglia (Rocky Balboa) plays Bo, a bully of Jimmy's who becomes his friend, Greer (Jawbreaker) plays Joanie, a co-worker of Ellie's who dislikes her and Scott Baio (Charles in Charge, Happy Days) also appears as himself. This isn't bad, Ricci is great in it and I recommend it for fans of the genre.

I honestly don't understand the bad ratings that some people have given this movie. It is a favorite of mine and one that I watch every October when I am watching my Halloween collection of movies. The well-known actors (Christina Ricci, Joshua Jackson, Milo Ventimiglia, Jesse Eisenberg, Portia de Rossi, Judy Greer, Michael Rosenbaum) are great, not to mention the dog Zipper (Solar). The movie is certainly not the same-O, same-O werewolf movie. And it is kind of fun having it take place in the Hollywood Scene with some actors and singers playing themselves. I recommend it to anyone who wants to see a good movie for the Halloween Season. My only problem with it is that they never made a sequel.

I could make all kinds of jokes about the title and the movie's long history in development hell and sordid shoot. But I won't. I could even talk about how it got castrated at the movie theater by getting slapped with a PG-13 rating and bombed financially. But I won't. Instead I'll simply talk about what's being presented on this DVD. Simply put, the unrated (and originally intended) version of Cursed is a gleefully over-the-top gorefest with some hammy acting and decent special effects. All in all, it's an easy Saturday night with some friends enjoying the gruesome spectacle that Wes Craven tried so hard to keep control of, but seemingly failed on a couple of levels. It's not a bad film at all. I'll agree that dumping a PG-13 rating on it and sending it off to fend for itself in the wilds of the box office jungle was a pretty bad idea. I mean, true horror fans want their gore, well, gory...right? By cutting out what drives people to these movies in the first place, they in turn shot themselves in the foot (they being Miramax/Dimension). Christina Ricci and Joshua Jackson are passable as the leads, but Jesse Eisenberg as Ricci's brother steals the movie with an often amusing and interesting character who's coming to terms with his own "curse" much differently (and much more fun) than his sister. The special effects for the werewolf transformation sequences are quite effective and there is plenty of gore to be found throughout the film, all well done and squeam-inducing to boot. This is not a realistic film by any means. Nor is it believable even one bit. If you can set your differences aside with the back-story behind the creation of the movie and just take it at face value, I'm sure you will see it for what it actually is: a fast-paced, bloody, silly, sometimes campy werewolf movie with an above average cast and some neat gore and effects.