Curdled

By Noel Vera

Criticizing Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson's latest is like
shooting fish in a barrel: when you hear rumors of recasting and
reshoots, or when a movie is dumped in the markets without previews,
you're almost sure of a product so hideously bad the producers
aren't willing to risk the displeasure of critics.

"Cursed" when you actually see it isn't that dire--a werewolf movie
where the characters are semi-hip to the lore and danger of
lycanthropy (a Kevin Williamson trademark, where the characters know
some, but not enough), and the curse itself is a metaphor for
something going on in their lives (read: sexually transmitted
disease). Ellie (Christina Ricci) is a television producer having
trouble connecting with her boyfriend, museum exhibit designer Jake
(Joshua Jackson); her younger brother Jimmy (Jessie Eisenberg) is
having trouble keeping the school jocks from calling him a 'homo'
and otherwise making his life miserable. Things come to a head when
Ellie drives Jessie home on the way from a party, and they hit a
vehicle on Mulholland Drive. They fail to rescue the driver they had
hit, but not before both of them are bitten by whatever it was that
dragged her away…

What follows is a double soap opera, one about busy adult executives
trying and failing to trust and connect, the other about adolescents
struggling to establish their identity and sexuality. Williamson's
script does a serviceable enough job with the plot and dialogue,
though with so many storylines going on (the result of all those
rewrites, probably) you can't dwell on any one situation or
character for any appreciable amount of time, and nothing is really
developed satisfactorily. Craven's directing bumps things along at a
fairly lively pace (though much of the gore you'd associate with a
Craven picture has been toned down, presumably to accomodate a
bigger, younger audience), and he seems able to communicate a sense
of people onscreen having a considerable, if confused, amount of
fun.

The filmmakers are helped by the fairly competent cast--Judy Greer
is funny as a hysterical publicist, Eisenberg puts some charm into
his geek turned wrestling champ and sex magnet, Jackson appears
zoned out most of the time--which fits the character, more or less
(at least he doesn't look like he's taking himself too seriously).
Christina Ricci lends a Wednesday Addams eeriness to her Ellie while
making her a recognizably troubled and unhappy human being--a woman
too unsure about herself and her relationship with a man to be
wholly complacent about being a person, much less a person whose
shape shifts every middle of the month. Ricci has unusual features,
perfect for the ghoulish pictures that pepper her resume
(two "Addams Family" movies, "Casper"); the same time she has the
acting chops to create nuanced characters in small films like "The
Ice Storm," "The Opposite of Sex," "Monster" (where she was, I
thought, more impressive than Oscar-winning Charlize Theron), and
even this one, to some extent.

Maybe the picture's basic problem is that Craven and Williamson, who
are said to have 'remade the face of horror' with their "Scream"
movies (they gave it a smart, self-reflexive sheen, is all, a sheen
that quickly dulled with all the sequels and copycat pictures that
followed), have themselves been left behind. Monsters as a metaphor
for high school anxieties has already been thoroughly mined, in a
more varied, moving, and appealing manner, by Joss Whedon's "Buffy
the Vampire Slayer" series (and in fact a moment where a bully outs
himself as gay seems directly lifted from one episode); monsters as
a metaphor for corporate anguish has been mined, in turn, by
Whedon's "Angel" series. The movie is funny and clever in its own
flatfooted way, just not funny and clever enough to be distinctive,
or memorable; it probably needs to be spun off in a TV series to
allow for the time and space required to develop its own voice (if
ever anyone's interested).

It's sobering, thinking of Craven's overall career while watching
this movie. I wouldn't call him an artist, and unlike, say, Tobe
Hooper ("The Texas Chainsaw Massacre;" "Poltergeist;" "Salem's
Lot"), he doesn't quite have the eye or sense of rhythm to be
properly called a filmmaker, much less a filmmaker of talent. But he
had energy to spare and the willingness to explore the outer edges
of shock cinema in no-budget productions like "Last House on the
Left' (his remake of Ingmar Bergman's "The Virgin Spring") and "The
Hills Have Eyes." Nowadays Craven's content to make studio pictures
with only a fraction of the lust for transgressive imagery (about
the only tense moment in this film takes place in the women's room,
when a concerned co-worker tries to help Ellie make it through what
appears to be the Menstrual Cramp from Hell).

The werewolves in the picture are your standard-issue CGI
constructs, more cuddly than menacing and covered with a shitzu-type
fur, where way back when Craven had his actors squeeze intestines
with their fingers in "Last House on the Left"--and it was the fact
that they were squeezing real (animal) intestines, used because no
one had the money to manufacture fake ones (much less whip them up
on a computer), that made his movies so freakishly fascinating. I
wouldn't call him a great horror filmmaker, exactly (a fairly good
one maybe), but you almost wish he'd suffer a serious flop and be
forced to go back to his no-budget, exploitation-flick roots, just
so that he can actually do something interesting again.

(First appeared in Businessworld, 3/11/05)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)