Of course, the SCREAM films were never quite all they were cracked up to be. Their chief cleverness lay in openly acknowledging the slasher genre they were mining: this gave them a license to trot out all the established tropes, while critics who normally would not be caught dead in a horror film, could sing hymns of praise to their self-referential, post-modern sensibility. It’s a one-trick approach with little scope, so it’s no surprise that its application in CURSED suffers from the law of diminishing returns. What is surprising is that Williamson and Craven could have miscalculated so badly that the film entirely failed to click with audiences when it was released in theatres.
The story begins with a pair of women receiving a dire warning from a gypsy woman (like in THE WOLF MAN, get it?) Soon thereafter, brother and sister Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) and Ellie (Christian Ricci) see one of the women (Shannon Elizabeth) killed by a wolf-like monster after they ram into her car. Both Jimmy and Ellie are bitten and/or scratched in the struggle, and gradually come to realize that they are “cursed” with the Mark of the Beast; that is, they are turning into werewolves.
Unfortunately, this “curse” turns out to be a mild annoyance at most: the central dilemma never registers, because they never really seem in danger of turning into animals or losing their humanity. Instead, the film stumbles through a jumble of ideas: Being a wolf helps you get girls in high school like in TEEN WOLF; it gives you increased sensory awareness in your dog-eat-dog workplace like in WOLF; it gives you a craving for blood and sexual charisma (a detail more appropriate for vampire films like THE LOST BOYS); but never fear, as in the TV show WEREWOLF and the movie AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN PARIS, you can save yourself by severing the bloodline — i.e., killing your werewolf progenitor.
Despite Jimmy’s reading from a few mythology books, we never really learn the “rules” by which these lycanthropes abide. Do they transform at will or involuntarily? Only at night and during the full moon, or anytime they get mad? And how long do Jimmy and Ellie have before their condition becomes irreversible? Without these plot points clarified, the story becomes just a pointless exercise, never generating any real suspense or mystery.
Another part of the problem is the attempt to integrate Ellie’s love life into the story. Her sputtering relationship with boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson) seems entirely gratuitous (not to mention dull), but you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that it wouldn’t be in the film if it weren’t going to tie-in with the plot’s big mystery: who is the Top Dog — or, in this case, the Alpha Wolf? In order to hide the all-too-obvious answer to this question, Williamson’s script not only throws in a character who acts suspicious for no good reason (refusing to show evidence that would exonerate him) but also adds a second werewolf (just like SCREAM created a “surprise twist” with its two killers). As is too often the case with Williamson’s scripts, the revelation of the culprit is a disappointment because the killer is not particularly interesting. The story-telling rational seems to be: “Well, it had to be somebody, so why not this character?”
The story is hardly enlivened by its cast, most of whom would seem more comfortable on a television show like DAWSON’S CREEK. The sole exception is Ricci, who clearly deserves to be better utilized here. Her dark and moody attractiveness (she’s ready to graduate from Wednesday to Morticia Addams) makes her look like a Vampire Queen who could round up these mangy werewolves into a slave-herd forced to do her bidding — but the film gives her a hapless victim role while decidedly unscary actors are cast as the monsters.
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