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Cursed (2005) Starring: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg by Richard Leigh 
From the master of horror comes 'Cursed'. Wes Craven brought us 'The Hills Have Eyes' in 1977, 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' in 1984, the 'Scream' series in the 90s, and then in 2005 his directorial talent welcomed 'Cursed' to the world. Before watching this film I was greatly excited, I'm a huge fan of Wes Craven and love all his previous films I have mentioned here. He's a great director, an expert in the creation of tension and suspense. As 'Cursed' began I started to think he'd done it again. The opening is powerful, it gripped me, and then the film unfolds.
Set in Los Angeles, Ellie and her brother Jimmy are driving home one evening when an animal unexpectedly smashes against the windscreen. They swerve and crash into another car, knocking it off the road in the process. It's a scary situation for them and they pull over, walking across to the car that they glanced to check that everybody is okay. The car has overturned and is on its roof, a female passenger is alive and well but is still strapped in with her seatbelt and is understandably panicking. Jimmy helps her out and gets her seatbelt undone, but it is then that a werewolf takes hold of her body and begins to drag her away. Jimmy grabs onto her and is swiped by the werewolf creature in the process, his sister Ellie grabs on to him also and the three of them are dragged through bushes by this mysterious creature of the night. Admitting defeat and letting go, Jimmy and Ellie return home where Jimmy begins to research on the internet about werewolves. The next day they discover that the girl has been killed and so the film really begins to get going as the pair seek to discover what has happened to them and what shall become of their future. What starts out as an interesting concept for a horror film soon becomes tiresome, the film begins brilliantly and I thought that 'Cursed' would turn out to be an excellent choice; sadly this was not to be so and it is in fact just one huge disappointment. In the 90s (and stretching into 2000 with the last in the trilogy), the 'Scream' films were greatly effective in parodying the horror genre and yet still remaining scary. I thought that 'Cursed' would be similarly as impressive and yet at every turn it just seems to disappoint. It runs like a bad B-Movie, it seems so tacky and low budget and yet this monstrosity of a film actually cost a cool $38 million. All I can say of this is what a waste of money! No way did they need a budget as large as this to come up with 'Cursed', in fact I really wish they hadn't come up with the film at all. It was an absolute waste of 90 minutes of my life; an hour and a half that I'll sadly never be able to get back. Containing lines such as 'Fair fight? This is Hollywood!', this is obviously a film that is extremely self aware and yet this is simply not enough to explain why 'Cursed' is such an awful film. When films are self aware they tend to be vaguely humorous and yet 'Cursed' just isn't. A while back I watched the horror satire 'Jack Frost' and thought that was bad, but when I compare it to 'Cursed' I start to think that it wasn't so bad after all. This film seems tongue-in-cheek in part, and yet for the majority of the film you get the distinct impression that things are being taken a little too seriously and the film just doesn't work. Wes Craven always builds suspense in his films and this is of course true in 'Cursed' also, but the bad outweighs the good by far here and even Craven's best attempts at suspense can't help to save this film. In terms of the casting it's not all bad news. I felt that Christina Ricci performed extremely well in her part as Ellie, I like her style of acting and thought it really worked in 'Cursed'. She was well selected and I enjoyed the role she played within this film, so at least that's one plus point to draw from 'Cursed'. Performing alongside Ricci as her brother however was Jesse Eisenberg as Jimmy. Quite frankly he was awful and at times his acting was so cardboard that I thought they may even have replaced him with a cut-out. Poor casting here, something that can be said of a lot of the people that were picked to perform within this film. It's probably not all their fault though, the script to 'Cursed' is so terrible that few I feel could come out of it looking anything short of awful. Luckily for him it didn't completely ruin his career though, Jesse Eisenberg did eventually manage to get more work even if it wasn't until two years later. It started so promisingly, and yet as the film progressed things just seemed to go from bad to worse. The attempts at CGI that were made here quite frankly are laughable. It's hard to believe that it was 2005 that 'Cursed' was released, from their grasp of CGI it didn't seem anywhere close to that recent. Every time the 'werewolf' was shown I just couldn't help but laugh. It looked more like a rat than a werewolf. The use of CGI in 'Cursed' is about as impressive as Jesse Eisenberg's acting here and always it is greatly disappointing. It wasn't even bad in a humorous way really, it was funny in that it was so awful but I don't think they intentionally made it this tacky. Nothing was done right in 'Cursed' and even here they fail to get things right, just what were they thinking when they made this I wonder. On no account would I ever recommend 'Cursed'. It wouldn't be a good film for any occasion, and unless you really want to waste an hour and a half of your life then I'd suggest that you give this film a wide berth. I just don't know why Wes Craven would direct this film, he's gifted us with such impressive horror films in the past and yet 'Cursed' is one of the worst horror films I've ever seen. In every genre there is always going to be the good, the bad, and the ugly; it just so happens that 'Cursed' falls into that final category there and disappoints on every level possible. With horror films I can often appreciate why people would perhaps like a film when I have not done, with 'Cursed' however I fail to see how anyone could ever possibly like such a bad film. It's just not good, its only redeeming features are its impressive opening and Christina Ricci's performance and neither of these factors are enough to save this film from being anything but an epic failure.  Rating: 1 out of 5 Details about the film: |
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