Wes Craven’s “Cursed” continues the seemingly endless string of bland horror films released since the end of December, adding nothing new to the pile of unmitigated crap that moviegoers and sad-sack film critics have been exposed to over the past two months.
While Craven’s name has become associated with several creative horror films, it has been associated with some atrociously boring works as well. Ever since his break-out film, “Last House on the Left,” in the early 1970s, Craven has run hot and cold over the entire horror cinema landscape. Occasionally he’ll turn in a boldly original and genre-defining piece of work, such as “A Nightmare on Elm Street” or “Scream,” but then he’ll follow it with a long string of what can only be called hack work, such as “Vampire in Brooklyn” or “Scream 2.”
“Cursed” falls with a sickening thud in the latter category, with every mediocre second of it feeling like a painfully tired cliché. Starring the woefully miscast Christina Ricci, the film deals with an outbreak of werewolves in Los Angeles. Since it plays the horror movie game by rote, watching the film becomes a matter of counting down to the obligatory plot points and character revelations.
One, two, three, guy behind the door; one, two, three, she’s really a werewolf.
The main plot thrust is that Ricci and her brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) get in a car crash on Mulholland Drive. A driver in another car is dragged off by a wolf and the siblings are both bitten while trying to save her. They then have to come to terms with their budding lycanthropia.
The film takes absolutely no chances with the werewolf genre, playing everything straight. Here’s a gypsy fortune teller, here’s a weird mark on the hand, here’s an absurd amount of full moons occurring in a single month. When Jimmy starts looking up books on werewolves and begins quoting unnamed “experts” about how the process works, it feels as if the filmmakers just shrugged and decided they couldn’t come up with anything more original.
Scripted by “Scream” screenwriter Kevin Williamson, the film pays homage to the Lon Chaney Jr. classic, “The Wolf Man,” but never tries to break free of that film’s overarching mythology. Apparently the intervening 64 years of progress, with such films as “The Howling,” “An American Werewolf in London” and “Wolfen” creating whole new ways to look at werewolves, have not made enough of a dent in Williamson’s imagination for him to come up with something creative. By the time a werewolf seems to be defeated but then pops up and is shot in the head, it becomes obvious that
nearly everyone involved has
completely run out of ideas.
Williamson has always been a one-trick pony in any case. The meta-horror of “Scream” seems like a fluke in retrospect, after nearly a decade of diminishing returns. The complete lack of imagination expressed in “Cursed” shows that both Craven and Williamson might be better off not making any more films together. Or any more films at all, for that matter.

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