Cursed (2005)

Starring Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg.

Cursed is, I think, a horror movie about a brother and sister (Eisenberg and Ricci), the boys crush, her closeted-gay jerk boyfriend, his sister's boyfriend, and the girls he dates. The sisters boyfriend is a werewolf who turned another girl into a werewolf who kills the girls he dates for revenge. The brother and sister are turned into werewolves by the boyfriend, the brothers dog is also turned. The only way to cure themselves is to kill the werewolf that changed them. They kill the vengeful female werewolf, then kill the boyfriend werewolf, with the help of the closeted-gay jerk boy, who admits to having feelings for the brother. At the end, the brother wins over his crush.

The film received mostly negative reviews and was called the worst werewolf movie to date. Poor special effects and a predictable plot 'ruined' the film in the eyes of critics and viewers. As a 2005 monster film in competition with other (gory) 2005 horror films, the mainstream and the special effect geeks would be unimpressed. As a girl who likes campy late 80's/90's/early 2000's spooky films, this movie was spot on. As a horror film, yeah it was a flop. As a film reminiscent of the aforementioned films, it was pure genius. Every film is the same. Same special effects, same blood and guts. People want things that shock them, that they think open doors to new levels of extreme. The 1996 cult film 'Scream' which satirized horror films while being a horror film in and of itself, if it had been released in 2005 or today, in 2013, would have bombed. It would have been a dud. If Cursed had been released 10 years earlier, it would have been a prize winner. Wasn't that Christina Ricci's prime, anyway? Horror movies are lame now, nothing is scary. It's just a shock factor. What's grosser, watching a human beings muscles being pulled out of their arm, or slicing their arms open to fill vats with blood? Who cares. Give me back films like I Know What You Did Last Summer and the first Final Destination. Something frightening that doesn't make me want to vomit. The horror genre thinks it's upping the ante by upping the gore, they're wrong. The mainstream viewer is a robot that likes what they're told to like by people they pretend are important. This evolved into a rant against the mainstream, and maybe that's what Cursed is to me. A movie behind it's time that's better than the ones surrounding it. A flop in the eyes of people who look with them half closed, a declaration to the people who are free to see.

I would recommend this film to the same people I would recommend The Informers and Cosmopolis to. The people who reject the system. The cool ones. You know. I'd give it a 6.

Cursed currently holds a 16% critic rating and a 37% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Cursed trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhLyx8GojoI

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0257516/

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1142569-cursed/