Cursed

Oh my God, Kevin Williamson, you totally suck ass! It's unbelievable! What the hell is wrong with you, man! You had, like, one good idea, for Scream, back in the early fucking 90's, and you've managed to turn it into an entire decade-plus career of shittacular hacktackery like The Faculty, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and...shudder...Halloween H20.

You see, Kev, we've all figured out you're little game by now...You write horror movies about characters who are smart enough to have seen a few horror movies. They're all cutesy, "self-aware," post-modern horror movies, and every time you set up some obvious similarity between your movie and the horror movies of past eras, we in the audience are expected to just shit ourselves with gleeful nostalgia, congratulating one another for being "smart enough" to catch that crafty reference to Nightmare on Elm Street.

Scream was a slasher movie that toyed with the conventions of the genre by foretelling them and making them super-obvious. I Know What You Did Last Summer took on the revenge film in exactly the same way. Then, The Faculty did the same exact thing with alien/pod people movies. And now Cursed plays out exactly the same story yet again, except with really bad CGI werewolves.

And you dragged Wes Craven's whole career down with you. Man, what the hell is with you? If you're not careful, I may just put you up for a Braffy, jerkwad.



Wait a minute...I just realized I don't know Kevin Williamson, and that he, nor anyone else who matters in Hollywood, cares at all what I think. Boy, is my face red.

Anyway, Cursed blows. But I guess you already knew that. Everyone knew that. Which is why no one saw it in theaters. But now you can rent it, and if you work in a video store, you can do so for free. And then, if the mood hits you, you can even review it in your blog. If, that is, you're cool enough to have your own blog.

But maybe you don't know how much it blows. Maybe you don't know that it's a werewolf movie in which you hardly get to see a werewolf, and when you do, it looks a lot like either a guy in a rented wolf suit thrashing about aimlessly or a CGI-enhanced wolfish blur. Maybe you don't know that it features a supporting performance by Scott Baio as himself. Maybe you don't know that it makes the exact same mistake as the Scream sequels by obviously casting an actor too famous to play a small supporting role, indicating that they will, in fact, be the killer at the end.

As a matter of fact, maybe you didn't know that Williamson's thoroughly tone deaf script needlessly transforms the werewolf genre into the slasher genre, turning the movie into another empty whodunnit exercize with an ensemble of characters desperately trying to figure out who is the "head werewolf."

The movie is so so so so very lazy. Williamson, desperate to play around some more with his tired old "self-aware" horror movie schtcik, has set almost all the action in a newly-opened LA club that's themed after...old horror movies! So a scene with a werewolf unfolds right in front of...a statue of Lon Cheney as The Werewolf! Ha ha! Man, that is so fucking deliciously clever!

The movie's so lazy, in fact, that I'm going to be lazy and not bother giving it a real review. So here goes the short version:

Siblings (Christina Ricci and some dude who's probably on a WB show or something but whom I'm too lazy to look up) are attacked by a werewolf who then eats half of Shannon Elizabeth. And probably not the tasty half, if you catch my meaning.

Then Ellen DeGeneres' girlfriend, who's a psychic, tells them they're werewolves and that they have to find and kill the head werewolf. Then, the nerdy brother does the same stuff Michael J. Fox did in Teen Wolf, clearly having seen that movie. Then, the siblings for some reason go to Joshua Jackson's new club and hang out and never really demonstrate any werewolf powers or turn into werewolves or kill anyone or before killing the head werewolf and moving on with their dull, meaningless, generic lives.

Being a werewolf (or at least a person who never turns into a wolf but self-identifies as a werewolf) is used as two separate, equally lame metaphors. First, it's implied that being a werewolf teen is like being a gay teen - you have something inside of you that you must keep secret. When that metaphor begins to break down, Williamson resorts to Metaphor Plan B, werewolfism as Sexually Transmitted Disease. Seriously.

This movie is awful.

The end.