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Cursed |
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| Use the darkbrown scrollbar to the right to scroll down for the review. |
Ellie and her
brother are on their way home when
an animal suddenly jumps up on their car causing
them to collide with another car. It turns out
that the animal was a werewolf and after trying
to help the woman in the other car, the siblings
get some ugly scratches from the wolf. It doesn't
take long before they start noticing their new
found strength and it soon becomes obvious to them
that they've turned into werewolves. How will they
get out of this one?
Dimension Pictures has screwed us over a couple
of times lately by cutting the excellent horror
flick Darkness to pieces, making people hate it
since the PG-13 version makes absolutely no sense,
by holding onto movies forever like Mindhunters
and Ritual, letting them get released on DVD
abroad many years before they release them in
US theatres and now, they've cut Cursed to PG-13.
I'm smelling a bankruptcy coming. Since they're
releasing Darkness on one uncut and one cut DVD,
hoping to make a couple of extra bucks on it I
can only assume that they will do the same for
Cursed, plus they'll probably release the early
version of the movie as well since there are
actually two Cursed movies, though the first one
wasn't good enough so they re-shot the entire
thing. My guess is that they'll release that
version as a direct to video movie called something
like "Cursed 2 - This time, find out what REALLY
happened!". Cutting Cursed to PG-13 might have
been a good idea though since this is a teen
flick which wouldn't appeal to many people above
the age of 16. It's simply not solid enough and
people who have watched many horror flicks in
their lives tend to be a bit more critical.
Well, the movie's a box-office disaster anyway
and with all the bad publicity that it's gotten,
I'm not surprised at all. I mean, even if you
had only seen the trailer you'd get put off
since it looks like "Garfield: The Spooky Sequel"
with all the bad CGI. Naturally I went in
thinking I would absolutely hate it after all
the bad things I've heard but I honestly didn't
think that it was that bad. Hell, it's a whole
lot better than Boogeyman, White Noise, Hide and
Seek and all those other stupid PG-13 movies
that are getting released these days (with the
obvious exception of movies like The Grudge).
The movie starts out like, well, it starts out
like an incoherent mess really so no big
surprise there. But after a while it starts
getting better and better and when approximately
40 minutes had passed I was loving it. Then,
something happens and it goes back to being
hilariously bad and after a while it goes back
to being pretty damn entertaining. So what we
get here is really a wild rollercoaster ride.
It's pretty obvious that the guys behind Scream
made this film though as it's basically Scream but
with werewolves. Wes Craven is a good director and
the photography in the movie does really look good
though from a budget this high, one should expect
better from such professionals. I have yet to see
the uncut version but it's pretty obvious where
the movie was cut, I mean, the death scenes would
black out and you'd hear the gory stuff that was
going on, you just didn't get to see it. This
didn't bother me too much though, gore alone doesn't
make a movie, at least not a theatrical one. Gore
is just the ketchup on the fries, it's sweet but
if you're out of ketchup, you'll enjoy the fries
anyway. The CGI however drags the movie down. As
you can tell from the trailer, the werewolf dog
looks as if it was taken out of Scooby Doo and the
werewolf transformations look exaggerated even
though they do look pretty convincing.
The acting is good and Christina Ricci nails it
brilliantly. Even Mya gives us a pretty good
performance. The only one that feels like he
didn't belong in there was Joshua "Dawson’s
Creek" Jackson. He didn't feel very credible
and his acting was rather stiff. Not at all
like he was in Urban Legends. It also felt like
he was thrown in there to keep the running time
above 70 minutes as his character really didn't
feel needed, nor welcome. In the end however I'm
more than pleased with the result of this movie,
after all the bad rumours and problems that
this flick had, it feels good to see that it
wasn't as bad as I'd thought it would be.
The uncut version is said to be pretty nasty
but this PG-13 version is pretty bloodless.
As expected we get a lot of teen pop rock music
and a pretty solid score all in all. No surprises
here, it works but nothing more.
Cursed didn't turn out to be the disaster that
I had predicted it to be. I'll agree that it was
a bit of a mess, but at least it was an
entertaining mess, unlike the mess in my
apartment. If I were you, I'd probably wait
until the uncut version gets released on DVD
but I won't advice you not to go see it in
the theatres as it is still a pretty good flick.
Review By: AnthroFred
| starfire reviewed on Jul:12:2006 |
 It is a fun flick. loved Joshua jackson. I took the movie for what it was. too bad it was stuck at a PG-13 rating because it could have been a whole lot better but still fun. |
| hady bady reviewed on Jun:05:2006 |
| great and wonderful |
| christof reviewed on Jan:06:2006 |
 i can't wait till the uncut version. Do you review that one too. |