A werewolf loose in Los Angeles changes the lives of three young adults, who, after being mauled by the beast, learn they must kill their attacker if they hope to change their fate.
Well, that's sorta true.
Kinda.
Not really.
More like TWO young people are mauled and cursed. One is just plain killed.
Ok.
First things first.
Wes Craven has a well-deserved reputation for making horror films.
He's made such gems as The Last House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare On Elm Street, The Serpent And The Rainbow, Shocker, and Scream.
Sadly, he's decided to rest on his laurels.
Cursed has no horror at all, and is the epitome of what Hollywood has been doing to one of the all-time great movie monsters recently: the "funny" werewolf movie.
I'm not sure I understand this phenomenon. For me, it's a complete waste of a perfectly good movie monster. Werewolves are supposed to eat your ass, not give you the finger and gripe about fat thighs. Werewolves are supposed to be dark and evil, not skinny social climbers. But most importantly, werewolves are supposed to be SCARY.
This movie isn't. It has one clever bit of subversiveness in it, which I will explain in a bit, and one good scene in which one of the characters' dog, who has gotten infected with the werewolf whatevers, becomes a really angry mutant dog and tries to chew his face off for no reason. Not really true to the werewolf mythos, but hey, who's picky.
Certainly not theater audiences these days. I mean...
...Oh, wait, movie revenues are way down at the theater, aren't they? Maybe I'm needlessly badmouthing theater audiences.
Well, we'll see.
The movie is a relentless advertisement for the Craig Kilborn show. The main character works for the show, and is trying to find guests. In a clever bit of subversiveness, the movie tries to sell Scott Baio as the bad guy, but he doesn't even make a very good red herring. All in all, he has about 6 lines in the whole movie, which begs the question "Does Scott Baio still have a career?"
Clearly, no. "Please, please, SOMEONE, pay me! I'm broke and have no job skills!"
Apparently, neither does the screenwriter. Wes Craven's reputation, for me, was severely damaged by this show, and my willingness to buy a ticket to another movie because it's "a film by Wes Craven" is going to be very, very limited.
VERY limited.
Try none.
This movie was a huge, smelly waste of $80 million or so. All that money ought instead to have been put to better use - say, making a HORROR MOVIE about werewolves. The world didn't need another teen comedy with that happens to feature werewolves.
Let me just spell it out for you.
In high school wrestling, if you perform a WWE-style delayed vertical suplex on your opponent, any wrestling coach in the country would absolutely have you up on charges; in Cursed, the coach just winces, as though to say "wow, that musta HURT."
In ANY WORLD, if you have a bully who is secretly gay, and you call him on it in front of all his friends and in public, the last thing in the world he will do is come to your house later that night to announce that you were right about him and he WANTS you - except in Hollywoodland.
Werewolves die from silver bullets, not from being shot in the head with normal bullets. Don't you guys watch movies, fa Chrissakes?!?
In closing, let me just say that if I had directed this ungodly mess, it would have been an Alan Smithee film; I wouldn't have wanted my name attached to it in any way, much less with top billing. I feel for Christina Ricci, who hasn't yet gotten the notoriety she deserves and the concomitant ability to pick which scripts she will work on; she shouldn't be saddled with trash like this.
This movie is a definite buy for me - yes, a BUY - in fact, I want ALL the copies, so I can burn them on the front lawn of Miramax.
Never buy this DVD, unless you're planning on sending me the DVD for safe, legal disposal.
