Wes Craven’s Cursed: So Bad it’s Good
Here’s the setup: Ellie (Christina Ricci), an independent woman with an executive position on the Craig Kilborn show is dating the womanizing Jake (Joshua Jackson) who is opening a horror-themed night club on the Hollywood strip. Meanwhile, Ellie’s nerdy brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) is attempting to get the attention of the most popular girl in school, Brooke (Kristina Anapau), while being tormented by her overly masculine boyfriend, Bo (Milo Ventimiglia).
On their drive home from Jake’s club, Ellie and Jimmy encounter a large wolf-like animal that subsequently scratches them, giving them the mark of the beast. The rest of the film revolves around this werewolf who begins to torment them, along with the entire cast of characters, for the duration of the film. Sound familiar?
Craven and Kevin Williamson (Writer) worked together to incorporate parodies of characters across film genres into a spoof of a werewolf film, making this movie more of a comedy than a horror film. Similar to their collaboration on the Scream series, the jokes are hidden under the guise of a horribly performed thriller.
Along with the clich�© characters and plotlines used throughout the film, also came the clich�© cinematography. The overuse of odd camera angles often reveals hidden symbols in the background, such as wolf images and props organized in the shape of a pentagram. The dark lighting and quick cutting offers the perfect set-up for various horror spoofs, as well as the numerous jump-out-of-your-seat moments throughout the film.
Although the killer in this film is fairly obvious, the events leading up to the unveiling are extremely entertaining. Throughout most of the film the werewolf is a horrible computer animated caricature. Although a close-up toward the end of the film reveals that an elaborate wolf mask was also used, this costume is actually worse than the animation, which only enhances the humor evoked throughout the film.
The largest part of Craven and Williamson’s campy horror humor lies in their depiction of the death scenes. Cutting this movie for a PG-13 rating produced less than desirable results in this respect. Instead of the creative and gory deaths offered by earlier collaborations from these two men, the killings were quick, and fairly clean, and added nothing to the comedy of the storyline. In exchange for these gruesome comic killings, the film also offers its audience a ton of cheap thrills thrown at us from every possible angle.
The movie presents a fairly large cast of “celebrities” (Mya, Shannon Elizabeth, Judy Greer, Scott Baoi, along with the actors mentioned above). Despite this “incredible” supporting cast, Christina Ricci’s acting was the biggest disappointment in the film. Her portrayal of Ellie was bland, forced, and just not funny. Although the script did offer an enormous amount of shoddy dialogue, the other actors made it work by adding some comic flair.
Although this film is obviously not Oscar material, it is an entertaining take on the thriller genre. Similar to its predecessor, American Werewolf in London, this film incorporates the entertaining elements of a variety of horror films and exploits their comic potential.
