Cursed: Unrated Version DVD Review

Buy This DVD Now By Clicking On The Icon Below!

Title: Cursed: Unrated Version

Region: One

Genre: Horror

Stars: Christina Ricci, Joshua Jackson, Jesse Eisenberg, Judy Greer, Scott Baio, Milo Ventimiglia, and Shannon Elizabeth

Writer: Kevin Williamson

Director: Wes Craven

Feature length: 99 minutes

Extras: Featurettes, Select Scene Commentary With Special Effects Makeup Supervisor Greg Nicotero and Actor Derek Mears, Preview Trailers

Languages: English and French Language Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound

Subtitles: English Captions and Closed Captions and Spanish Language Subtitles

Packaging: Keep Case

Chapter Stops: 15

Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound

Year of Theatrical Release: 2005/DVD Release: 2005

Theatrical Distributor: Dimension Films

Home Video Distributor: Dimension Home Video

MPAA Rating: Not Rated

Reviewer: Mark A. Rivera

The anticipated collaboration between Writer Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven, who together resurrected the slasher subgenre in horror films with “Scream” in the 1990s turns out to be one of the biggest disappointments of 2005. It’s hard to figure how this film went so wrong considering the talent behind it, which also included Special Effects Makeup Supervision by non other than Greg Nicotero as well as the legendary Rick Baker. There are moments where Williamson’s talent for snappy dialogue brings a smile to the face and lightens up what is essentially the classic werewolf story told with teenagers and twentysomethings. When watching the film, I found it difficult not to compare it to previous werewolf films from the 1980s like “An American Werewolf In London” and “The Howling.” We are now so far beyond what was possible back then in the early 1980s and yet the werewolf makeup in “Cursed” doesn’t even look like a wolf. It looks more like a bear and the CGI wolf scenes are only marginally better than the terrible ones in “An American Werewolf In Paris,” a terrible sequel to the above-mentioned original. For me the creations in both “An American Werewolf In London” and “The Howling” are a litmus test from which all other werewolf pictures are judged because they represent a great leap in the genre and changed it forever. Now I do not expect every werewolf film to reinvent the genre like those 1980s’ classics, but I have seen films produced independently in Canada and England with a far smaller budget and definitely less resources to create believable monsters, and yet these films succeeded on several levels more than “Cursed” and if there are gnawing questions on my mind that I would like to ask the filmmakers is why? What happened? What went wrong?

Christina Ricci looks like she is playing Wednesday Adams as an adult with the stark black outfits and flat black hair. She almost looks as though she could be the older and prettier sister to the supernatural girl that crawls out of the television set in “The Ring.” The mythology is inconsistent and characters seem to come and go at times with little to no explanation. Williamson attempts to add some subtext to the affliction of being a lycanthrope by presenting a bullying character that turns out to be a closeted homosexual teenager, but any resonance this might have brought seems lost between predictable story set pieces and uninteresting characters in general. Overall, “Cursed” is a big disappointment considering the creative talent involved; it is neither scary, nor clever.

Dimension Home Video’s DVD edition presents “Cursed: Unrated Version” with a flawless anamorphic widescreen (2.40:1) aspect ratio presentation coupled with a high fidelity English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Soundtrack. A French Language Dubbed Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Soundtrack and English Captions and Closed Captions for the hearing impaired as well as Spanish Language Subtit6les are encoded onto the dual layered DVD as options. Greg Nicotero and Actor Derek Mears provide select audio commentary for four scenes from the film that can viewed individually or as one reel (25:18) and in addition these audio comments can be accessed while simply watching the film normally by switching between audio tracks using your remote control.

Additional extra value materials include a set of featurettes covering the making of the film (7:33), the effects (6:45), editing (5:31), and makeup (7:57). A reel of previews that include “Sin City”, “Scary Movie 3.5: The Unrated Cut”, and “Prozac Nation” appear before the main menu (7:20) and there is also a sneak peek trailer for “Dracula III: Legacy” (1:00) and a new Dimension Home Video promo (2:12) too. The main menu is animated while the subsequent menus are all standard interactive still frames that are easy to navigate.

I really wish I could say better things about “Cursed,” but I’m only one person so if you are a fan of Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven or into special makeup effects then by all means give “Cursed: Unrated Version” a look now that it is available at retailers on and offline courtesy of Dimension Home Video.

Return To The Previous Page

Buy This DVD Now By Clicking On The Icon Below!