Cursed - DVD Review

Sometimes the best thing for a DVD experience is just to have low expectations. Wes Craven's highly maligned Cursed certainly isn't among his (or writer Kevin Williamson's) best, but it's also not nearly as bad as the mainstream critics made it out to be. Yes, it's not original enough, too often feeling like something everyone involved has done before, but for a genre that typically just goes through the motions, this one runs its sharp teeth through them just fine. If we're judging the film on a strict thumbs up or down, it would have to be a down because of the lack of originality but if you're a horror fan and don't mind seeing just another solid genre entry, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Cursed.

Basically replacing "serial killer" with "werewolf" from his original Scream script, Williamson gives us all the classic horror archetypes from the too-trusting heroine (Ricci) to the starlet ready to die (Elizabeth) to the dorky kid ready to be the hero (a movie-stealing Eisenberg, the kid from Roger Dodger). After an ugly car crash, our heroes battle the werewolf within while trying to find the master who started the whole curse. With a few little Hollywood jokes thrown in for good measure, things come together somewhat predictably but with an enjoyable cast and solid direction from a horror master.

Cursed was clearly mangled at some point in production (but this unrated version appears to have fixed a lot of the problems critics had with the bizarre PG-13 edits in the theaters…I can't even imagine how that worked considering the gore in this version). It feels undeveloped at times, not scary enough and not funny enough. I wish there were a few more extras explaining the long delays, rewrites, and reshoots. Wouldn't it be interesting for the creators of a film to admit that it got tangled up in the Hollywood machine and try and explain how? But no, the extras on Cursed never explain how this once-anticipated horror flick turned into something to dump in February and rush to home video, were it should do very well. Because even with all its flaws, and maybe this is just my low expectations speaking after all the bad press, I'm surprised at just how horribly Cursed was received. It may not be extremely memorable but for a genre that produces awful straight-to-video material week in and week out, it's not half bad.

I know, faint praise, right? But as I was watching Cursed I couldn't help but think that it was a movie just a few years too late to ride the horror bandwagon. People are exhausted by straight forward horror now, going in for psychological Ring-like horror. But a few years ago, this would have fit nicely next to the original Scream trilogy, the Urban Legend flicks and those little I Know What You Did Last Summer movies. It was just delayed a bit too long and not fully thought out, but it didn't deserve the hatred it met at the box office earlier this year. There have been far bigger disasters that were just pushed aside. Now that the bad buzz has died down and netizens have moved on to other disappointments, as you're scrolling the horror entries in your Netflix queue looking for the next scare, lower your expectations and give this wolf a shot.