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CURSED ** out of *****
 Genres
2005 Directed by Wes Craven Written by Kevin Williamson Cast Christina Ricci .... Ellie Jesse Eisenberg .... Jimmy Joshua Jackson .... Jake Judy Greer …. Joanie Milo Ventimiglia .... Bo Portia de Rossi .... Zela Mya .... Jenny Shannon Elizabeth .... Becky
Scott Baio .... Himself
Cursed, to put it mildly, went through production problems. There were rewrites, reshoots, cast replacements, then the film was edited to get a PG-13 rating. Luckily the version I saw was the unrated version, but that didn’t help in any of the other areas. The film does, surprisingly, make sense. It just isn’t very good.
 | | My, a, heel broke. | The was the re-teaming of the creative forces behind the Scream series, Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven. A similar tone is gone for here, but it’s a tone that was fresh and interesting around the time the first Scream came out in 1996. This, along with the fact that Cursed isn’t as well written as Scream, makes it seem like a teen TV show with a werewolf chucked in the middle.
The opening scene of the film seems to beg the viewer not to take this movie seriously. Shannon Elizabeth and Mya are walking though a carnival and stop to get their fortunes read by a gypsy played by Portia de Rossi. I felt sorry for Wes, what could any director do with this? Being a horror film, the gypsy of course predicts death. This comes when brother and sister Ellie (Christina Ricci) and Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) crash into her car.
 | Ricci and Eisenberg watch the
dailies. | Christina Ricci seems to be both over-qualified and ill-suited to the role of Ellie. She’s, I guess, supposed to be a mix of hard career woman and tragically cursed victim. She doesn’t come across like that, but she could have at least shown up and played Christina Ricci. Ellie works for The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn, and has to rendezvous with actor’s publicists amongst her other duties. One notably annoying is Scott Baio’s publicist, Joanie (Judy Greer). Annoying both for her and for us as Scott and Joanie refuse to go away (though to Baio’s credit, he doesn’t seem like he wants to be in this movie).
Jimmy, isn't as cool as his sister, he's a pathetic high school geek who gets picked on by the captain of the wrestling team, Bo, and his slack-jawed friends. Jesse Eisenberg is pretty likeable in a standard horror dork role. There’s also Jake (Joshua Jackson), Ellie's boyfriend, who’s opening a horror movie-themed nightclub, which seems to exist solely for the purpose of in-jokes and stalking scenes.
Back to that car crash. It isn’t the crash that kills Shannon Elizabeth. Before Ellie and Jimmy can get her out of the wreck a werewolf eats her, and then infects Ellie and Jimmy. The rest of the movie thus involves Ellie and Jimmy working out they’re werewolves, being chased by werewolves, wanting to kill the main werewolf, and sorting out their love lives.
 | Is it me, or is the prospect of a
Ricciwolf more cute than scary? | During their tedious journey of discovery several weird things help to undermine the movie. Late in the game the werewolf goes from being a snarling beast, to having a personality and giving people the finger. And, despite Rick Baker being credited as responsible for creature design, the werewolf looks a lot worse than the one he created twenty years earlier for An American Werewolf in London (though he probably can’t be blamed for the student project-level CGI transformation). Then there’s the fact that we seem to be told straight out that one character is not the main werewolf, only to have the film carry on as if we don’t know this then try to spring a twist on us.
Cursed is generic enough story-wise that it needed to be clever, but it’s not clever enough to save it from being forgettable. A bunch of generic trendy people get chased around, several empty jokes and remarks are made. Scott Baio appears as himself in a pointless role (which was originally shot by Corey Feldman (who wasn’t playing Scott Baio, by the way)). It’s not the train wreck some people want it to be, it’s just another film to throw on the forgettable horror movie land fill.
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