Movie Review: Cursed

By By Michael Boyd

Thursday, March 3, 2005

Cursed

PG-13, 86 minutes, Southwinds 12

Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson re-team for a horror film that uses all the rules laid out in their Scream series.

Their new flick,Cursed, begins with a brother and sister inflicted with the curse of the werewolf. The siblings must search out the cause of their infliction, all the while dealing with effects of the curse.

People seem to take Wes Craven too seriously since the success of his recent films – he never made thought provoking horrors in the vein of The Sixth Sense or The Others, and in fact has gotten less serious as his career has progressed. This film proves that. There are a number of cheesy moments, including some bad special effects, a flimsy plot and unmemorable performances, although Christina Ricci does a good job. There are, however, lots of jumps and tense moments, despite the lack of the usual Craven gore element, present in his past films — obviously an effect of the Hollywood system he was never a big part of until now. To my knowledge, he has never made a PG-13 horror film before.

Williamson’s writing is typical of his style, part Scream, part Dawson’s Creek, but in Craven’s hands doesn’t take itself so seriously. There are as many laughs as screams. There are also plenty of nods to past horror films throughout the picture, especially in a particular themed club (where Craven’s Freddy Krueger is displayed), and Ricci herself looks strikingly like Morticia Addams (her mother when she played Wednesday Addams in the Addams Family films).

I wouldn’t call this a good movie, but a lot of fun in an older style of horror film. This is the film that the characters in the Scream series would have loved.

Michael Boyd

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