The Wake

It isn’t a true L.A. premiere party without a dozen or so Hollywood (stick)figure-heads attempting poisonous, biting remarks to their cohorts over their Prada clutches while their agents scurry desperately in search of table scraps. Or so we’ve been told via the endless flicks of Hollywood fodder we watch. You know the type – those that recount the lives of numerous Tinseltownies who live their American Idolized fantasies up in the hills. The ones that at the same time reveal that if you ain’t Jennifer Aniston, it’s assured that you’ll bare fangs with the likes of Carrot Top on who comes first on “The Late, Late Show.” So it’s not surprising that Wes Craven’s “Cursed,” is no different in it’s selfishly blatant promotion of the shallowness that appears to consume the Hollywood ideal.

Christina Ricci stars as the ever perky Ellie, an industry insider (think Wednesday Addams after she’s left the harmony hut) who, along with her geek of a brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) are “infected” by a big bad wolf and soon after begin to feel the effects in their daily lives. In fulfilling the epitome of the stereotype, Jimmy is able to beat the high school’s homophobic jock at wrestling. Of course Ellie goes ga-ga for the smell of blood (one of the worse scenes in the movie in which Ricci absurdly follows the scent of a bloody nose through the office). But all’s not right when Ellie visits her beau Jake (Joshua Jackson), who is opening up a horror-themed club on Sunset Boulevard complete with werewolf mannequins and medieval torture devices (pray-tell, where might you guess the “battle-scene” ends up?). When Ellie begins to suspect her beau is the big, bad kahuna, as opposed to the regular wolves her and her brother have become – an example of one of the many holes in Kevin Williamson’s script – let the hair-raising begin.

As a generation of those who saw “Scream” and “Scary Movie,” both of which flaunted (dramatically and comically) the “tricks of the trade” which Craven utilized to achieve his horror effects, what happens in “Cursed” is old news. We know that when Jimmy (a poor name choice, by the way, for a movie in which people shriek the name repeatedly) keeps calling his dog from under the table, that Fido is up to no good. And even with a surprisingly large number of cameos like Craig Kilborn, Mya, and Portia de Rossi in a film that is an hour and a half, it simply serves the idea that “Cursed” is all bark and no bite. To see Mya get assaulted by a werewolf in a parking garage is not even worth the price of admission.