28th
Drive-In Saturday Night #3: Doug Bentin Cries “Wolf”
Yeah, I thought so, too. Cursed.
As long as a single print of Vampire in Brooklyn exists, no other picture can be called Wes Craven’s worst film.
Which doesn’t prevent Cursed from settling pretty close to the bottom.
Written by Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream, Cursed really wants to strike gold again by casting a post-modern eye at the traditional werewolf movie.
Ellie (Christina Ricci) and her high school-aged dorky brother stop to help a victim of a car wreck along a wooded stretch of road late one night. The victim, like Drew Barrymore in Scream, is a recognizable B-list teen flick actress who will be dispatched immediately.
So Ellie and Kyle are bitten and soon the sign of the pentagram appears in the palms of their hands. Both gain added strength and both become sexually more attractive. And the downside of that is … ?
Well, yeah, the family dog becomes afraid of them, they become more aggressive and Ellie has a bad hair moment in the ladies’ room. Her regular fella Jake (Joshua Jackson) doesn’t know what to make of her more-then-usually canine mood swings and her snotty co-worker Joanie (Judy Greer in yet another snotty co-worker role) seems to irritate her more than ever.
Oh, and I forgot to mention the gypsy fortune teller. No kidding. A gypsy fortune teller.
The humor during the first part of the picture is well-placed and not too broad, taking second place to the atmospherics, sudden loud noises and shock cuts. But in act two, the movie goes into camp overload. Also, from a supernatural thriller, the film becomes a whodunit as the werewolves-in-training have to figure out who the real werewolf is. See, if they can destroy the originator of their curse, they will be free of it.
The setting of act two is Tinsel, a Planet Hollywoodish club decorated with memorabilia from horror films of the past. You can see this either as a touch of homage or as an attempt to let other movies set the scene for you.
Anyway, act three reveals the identity, after a few false discoveries, of the real villain and the movie settles on becoming a series of boring fight scenes between CGI monsters.
Add a couple of unnecessary pop culture references through scenes with Scott Baio and Craig Kilborn playing versions of themselves and you get a movie that adds up to, well, not much.
Craig Kilborn? Really? Alas, yes.
Coming along a couple of years after Cursed was another werewolf flick, slightly less absurd, slightly more entertaining.
There’s an old saying that wasn’t originally concocted for the movies but should have been: the good is the enemy of the great. If the public is willing to settle for the good, why bother to sweat out a movie that’s any better?
Unfortunately, in the world of the contemporary horror movie, the mediocre is the enemy of the good.
Which brings us to Skinwalkers, a title which refers to werewolves as jazzed up by Navajo folklore. It seems that there are two kinds of werewolves—those who think they’ve been cursed and those who think they’ve been blessed. As the movie opens we learn through printed titles and voice over, both of which are clunky, that a boy born of both a skinwalker and the usual kind of skinwearer, when he turns 13, will have the power to end the whole werewolf thing. Think of it as a Bar Mitzvah with Lon Chaney Jr. instead of a rabbi.
So the boy is Timothy (Matthew Knight) whose dad was a skinwalker but is now dead, and his mom, Rachel, is just a regular gal (Rhona Mitra). Tim and Rachel have been living with Tim’s Uncle Jonas (Elias Koteas”) but now a quartet of badass chopper-riding werewolves have come tooling into town so they can kill Tim before the Red Moon—the kid’s 13th birthday—four days from now.
This clan, which thinks the ability to chang shape and kill people is a good thing, are are decked out in leather and look like left overs from Werewolves on Wheels, American International, circa 1960. Timothy’s adult friends suddenly go all Dirty Harry, whipping out enough fire power to give Charlton Heston the heebie-jeebies, and our werewolf movie-turned biker movie becomes a western shootout, a la Sam Peckinpah.
Now you may think that these genre-shifts are a bad thing, sort of kitchen-sink cinema—as in “they tossed in everything but the”—but it’s actually fun. Writers James DeMonaco, James Roday and Todd Harthan have no objection to using whatever conventions come to hand, regardless of the genre. Director Jim Isaac (Jason X) goes right along with them, and so did I.
Is it great? Hey, are you talkin’ to me?
Is it good? That sound is me laughing at your question.
So, mediocre, huh? Definitely—but that doesn’t keep it from being fun for people who like horror-less horror movies, especially when the filmmakers toss is great bloody hunks of such pop-tragedy elements as father/son rivalry, brother vs. brother, family sacrifice, self sacrifice, and oh hell, whatever else was on sale at the Insta-Plot Store.
The cast also features Jason Behr as the meanest of the bad asses, Natassia Malthe as his werewoman, Kim Coates as his impatient follower, Sarah Carter as Jonas’ daughter, Shawn Roberts as her fella, and Tom Jackson as their Navajo wise man.
It’s all as stupid as a bowl of wax bananas and I wouldn’t recommend the movie to anyone, but you might put it on your rental list. In the meantime, screams break the silence, waking from the dead of night …
