Cursed
directed by Wes Craven
written by Kevin Williamson
starring Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson, Judy Greer, Mya, Milo Ventimiglia

         Teen Wolf is no classic but it depicts an entertaining story about a teenage boy who discovers that he’s a werewolf. It uses the plot as a metaphor for puberty and carries it even further into themes of masculine endowment, prowess and resulting confidence. The fact that the movie works as something more than literal may help its maturation compared to simpler teen comedies from the 1980s but the enjoyment of its storytelling allowed it to reach out to audiences. I could easily pitch a story relating the werewolf curse to menstruation as a bad joke on PMS (i'm informed that this idea was actually used for the film Ginger Snaps) but it doesn’t mean that I could write a film around it that people actually want to watch.
          Cursed is a movie that nobody could take pleasure in watching. Like Teen Wolf it features a teenager (Eisenbeg) who becomes a werewolf, but as a victim of an attack instead of the benefit of heredity. Avoiding the puberty angle, which is currently seeing enough use in superhero scripts, screenwriter Kevin Williamson instead attempts a predictable and sloppy sequence comparing homosexuality to the horrific burden. Either Williamson hasn’t seen the effectual scene in X2: X-Men United where Shaun Ashmore “comes out” to his parents as being a mutant, or he chose to ignore it and go ahead with his more literal and vapid effort, which comes off more as a gay joke than a clever correlation.
          Later on the wolf curse becomes somewhat representational of sexually transmitted infection as Judy Greer states that, “there’s no such thing as safe sex with a werewolf.” But that idea is either an argument that there’s no such thing as safe sex at all, or it is confusedly making up a distinction between two blood-borne pathogens. It is hard to believe that Cursed comes from the same team (Williamson and director Wes Craven) as Scream, a film that more ingeniously commented on the sexual conventions of horror films. Back then, though, it was an affirmation that your partner could be your killer. Now they’re trying to expand the warning to say that before sex kills you, it spreads to others who will die as well.
          Anyway, as I said, the levels on which the script might be appreciated are beside the point when the springboard is so inactive. The story is dull and the characters are so nondescript that it must have been easy for Craven to recast particular roles after production problems required long-delayed reshoots. In the current issue of Entertainment Weekly, Judy Greer mentions that character actors are given great responsibility to breathe life into underwritten parts. She must have been largely alluding to Cursed since hers is one of two performances –the other is Eisenberg’s –that displays any energy or enthusiasm for the work. I wish that I could say that the movie is worth seeing just for Greer, but even with her efforts the part she plays falls victim to the dreadfully campy direction that good scene-stealers are often pushed into. I’m made to recall Joan Cusack in Addams Family Values, for instance.
           Aside from the unclear themes, the unmotivated story elements (is there any reason for Ricci’s character to work for the Craig Kilborn show other than as evidence of how dated the film became through its delayed release?) and the plodding through roles (Joshua Jackson seems especially bored), in the end a film like Cursed is dependent on one thing that it absolutely lacks: fright. Even self-referential pop-horror has to exhibit some terror. Cursed has too many fake-outs, exhausting the device way past effective, and the computer generated wolf animation is laughable. I could have taken more seriously the use of Sully from Monsters, Inc. in the part of the creature. Seriously, I thought the wolfmen of Van Helsing and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban looked bad enough. I’d even settle for Teen Wolf Too’s Jason Bateman in latex.
           Wes Craven is often referred to as “shockmaster”, “master of horror”, “king of horror” and other nicknames that haven’t fit well since he got into the business of being more “cool” and “clever” than technically skilled. The fact that his reputation precedes him allowed for Cursed to continue trudging without legs and the film’s failure will hardly deter Bob Weinstein from hiring him again. The coolest and most clever thing that Craven could do, though, is a return to subtler filmmaking. Eventually it must become obvious to him that having characters discuss the monster so knowledgeably weakens the mystery behind that monster. We tend not to fear the overly familiar and in Cursed the only thing close to foreign is the memory of Craven’s talents.