The Unseen Movie Review

Cursed

Director Wes Craven is one of the kings of American horror. Not content with having helped shape the nature of the genre during the 1980s with his Nightmare on Elm Street films, he was also the man responsible for reinventing it as self-parody with the in-joke-laden Scream series. During his career, Craven has had ghosts, vampires, psychics and teenagers as his slashing, mass-murdering protagonists. With Cursed he turns his attention to yet another classic nasty – the werewolf.

Werewolves have had a fairly tough time of it in Hollywood recently. While vampires have been perennially popular, The Mummy made a comeback and Frankenstein’s monster keeps being reinvented anew, since the dire Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Wolf back in 1994 the only werewolf film to do much business was surprise French success Brotherhood of the Wolf four years ago. The last really good, big budget werewolf film was all the way back in 1981, with the modern classic An American Werewolf in London.

The trouble is, werewolves simply just aren’t that scary a prospect. Let’s face it, all they really are is big doggies and, for anyone who grew up in the 80s, one of the first thoughts that will spring to mind when someone mentions werewolves is Michael J. Fox covered in hair and playing basketball in 1985’s Teen Wolf. There the transformation into a hairy beast was – fairly disingenuously – used as a metaphor for puberty, in much the same way as it would later be with the character of Oz in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

So Craven’s set himself quite a task in taking on werewolves, and one only made more difficult by his own contributions to the horror genre, which have ensured that straight gore and shocks without a bit of humour these days hold little interest. Thanks to his own deconstruction of the genre in the Scream films – which were, incidentally, written by the same screenwriter as is responsible for this outing – Craven these days is expected to finely balance scares and laughs.

Unfortunately, Craven seems to have lost his touch. He took four years off after Scream 3, and in that time appears to have forgotten everything he once knew about making intelligent, funny yet scary movies. He tries to get the same combination of humour and horror that he has achieved in recent outings, but somehow his aim has ended up slightly off with both. A few good scares and a few good jokes do not a good movie make.

This is not as bad as most of the straight to video horror trash which still gets churned out by low-budget studios to this day, but it is also nowhere near as good as you would expect from a master of the genre armed with a good screenwriter and a halfway decent cast. Perhaps one to rent in a few months time, but not one to venture out for.

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM