Cursed

What I'm about to tell you is probably going to have me blacklisted in the horror community, but it has to be said...Wes Craven's Cursed is just not that great a movie. There I said it!



Sure, Wes has given us classic horror movies, the original The Hills Have Eyes, Last House On The Left and, of course, A Nightmare On Elm Street, but he's not above a mis-step or two, for example, A Vampire In Brooklyn or Swamp Thing, so let's just add Cursed to the 'miss' column. Here's the story: Christina Ricci plays a producer for the Craig Kilborn show in L.A. (and yes, this felt like a way to get 'inside' what was supposed to be a 'hip' show at the time, the problem was the Kilborn and his show were nothing but a slave to his giant ego...but that's another article for another time.), when Christina is on her way home one night, her car is hit by an animal causing an accident. While trying to help the other driver Christina and her brother are attacked by a werewolf. Now, we get to the inevitable, they begin to sense changes in themselves, increased strength (allowing the nerdish brother to gain some revenge on the bullies in his school) and heightened senses (setting up a strange sequence where Christina smells 'something good' that turns out to be a colleagues nosebleed.), but it never really goes anywhere good.

There's the obligatory werewolf attack and there's a mildly interesting mystery about who the 'main' werewolf is, because if we kill the first werewolf the curse is lifted. And there's what seems to be a commentary on the place of women in the workplace when Christina and her main romantic rival (a PR woman for Scott Baio who does a cameo) both turn out to be werewolves who appear to be more powerful than the male werewolves, leading me to believe that someone somewhere thought that we'd pick up on the whole 'powerless in the workplace but stronger when they're a monster' theme, which I'm sure probably had something to do with someone's menstrual cycle...but I really don't want to go there!!

I'm giving Cursed one out of four cigars because Wes didn't really bother to build a real werewolf for this dog, all the effects seemed to be CGI, which is just wrong, build the damned monster!! If you're looking for a good werewolf scare, go back to An American Werewolf In London, it's still the gold standard. And, until next time, remember that when there's a fog on the moor and the moon is full, my body hair gets longer and I howl at the TV, but that's mostly because the movie's so bad and, let's face it, I'm a bit of a slob, but until I'm always here to remind you that the best movies are bad movies.