THE CURSED
"In rural 19th-century France, a mysterious, possibly supernatural menace threatens a small village. John McBride, a pathologist, comes to town to investigate the danger - and exorcise some of his own demons in the process." (from IMDB)
Why did I watch this?
I'm a fan of horror movies and the imagery of silver fangs made me curious about what kind of werewolf movie this might be. The trailer was okay, but I think it was the victorian rural setting that caught my eye most.
What did I think of the movie?
2022's THE CURSED bites off more than it can chew in its attempt at a unique spin on the werewolf genre and in the end never enters the jaws of true horror.
First off I'd like to start with the fact that until I copied and pasted the film's synopsis from Internet Movie Database dot-com, I had no inkling this story even took place in rural France and thought the setting was the rural American South instead.
Anyway, the movie opens with a World War I, or Great War, battle which was evident by the presence of trenches, gas-masks, and gatling guns. A soldier is taken into a medical tent and bullets are extracted from his abdomen. Curiously the last of the shells inside him has fragmented despite resting within his soft belly flesh. The doctor digs into the wound, assuming two bullets had hit the spot on the man and shattered each other but instead he pulls out a silver bullet of non-German origin and the soldier on the table dies. The films cuts back thirty-five years earlier and focuses on a wealthy family and the surrounding lands owned by them. There is a superstitious woman among the Roma, a witch, or soothsayer, who predicting the upcoming "storm" and has a man melt down silver coins, supposedly "guarded by their family for generations," into sharp teeth for a mouth piece. There is a land dispute between the head patriarch and a gypsy Roman clan with legitimate claim. The patriarch responds by hiring mercenaries to massacre the clan. It is truly the film's most haunting long scene in which we watch from a distance as the mounted mercenaries run-over, set fire to, and mercilessly hunt down and shoot every member of the Roma clan. There is no supernatural terror here, just the unbelievable cruelty of human greed and disregard for people considered to be different. The mercenaries take the Roma man who melted the silver coins into teeth from the mouthpiece, cut off his hands and feet, and string him up as a scarecrow so that he may bleed out and die in agony while left out in the cold.
The Roma woman, soothsayer or witch, clutches the silver-toothed mouthpiece in a box in her arms as she is dragged by her hair, muttering curses on the mercenary and the men who hired them as they bury her alive to drown in the dirt. Soon after, the children of the patriarch and his surrounding people begin dreaming of the scarecrow and the Roman woman. These shared dreams lead them to the scarecrow's field where the dig up the Roma woman's box. A peasant among them is seized by a sudden trance, opens the box, wears the silver-teethed mouth piece, and bites open the neck of the patriarch's son. The wounded boy is taken home and checked on by a doctor who claims it is but a wound from a wild animal but the boy grows sensitive to daylight and after being discovered by his sister to have sprouted writhing flesh tentacles, flees from his father's home for the woods. It is soon after this that the surrounding area is then plagued by vicious animals attacks like few ever seen before -- one survivor, stricken mad with fright, claiming in her supposed delirium that what attacked her was a "dragon."
The rest of the movie is the patriarch and his men hunting for "wild animal/dragon" while also searching for his missing son. A pathologist is called in by the local police to help in identifying what exact animal has befallen their neighborhood but he soon says it is no natural beast but something else instead, something that not even the army could beat in a barely-spoken-of incident-- something that can only be stopped by bullets made from pieces of silver supposedly given to Judas in exchange for his betrayal of the Abrahamic or Judeo-Christian figure of Jesus Christ. In this rendition of the werewolf tale, lycanthropy is a form of the Abrahamic God's wrath or a curse cast by being bitten by metal jaws forged from Judas Iscariot's silver pieces.
Biblical lycanthropy is usually attributed to the Old Testament tale of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar who after trying to burn alive prophets was stricken by God with a type of heavenly plague, "Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles' feathers, and his nails were like birds' claws [Daniel 4:33]."
A quick googling of the biblical history of lycanthropy should've given the writers of 2022's THE CURSED the notion that infecting the patriarch with the furry curse would've been the most poetic -- a figurative monster of a man turned into a literal monster by his greed and gypsy magic so that his loved ones and strangers suffer around him? Now that would've made for a much better story but unfortunately that much-better movie only exists in universes other than our own so instead we get the complete opposite.
I can think of so many much more intriguing werewolf movies and was surprised to see such an obviously big-budgeted production flounder into such a generic monster flick. It never crescendoed in action or drama, and basically whimpered away in its story until the closing scene.
There were scenes of brief but unreasonable nudity and the werewolf special-effects were something so atrocious I thought I was watching a sci-fi channel monster movie from the early 2000's.
While the acting was decent enough, I kept thinking that everyone deserved a spot in a much more well-done project. How in the world could they spend so much money on costumes, architectural setting, and cinematography, but aim so low when it came to writing and special-effects? Now that was the true monster of the film.
Members of its stellar cast are the true titular CURSED due to their decent performances in what unfortunately ends up being a dumpster fire of a film.
Out of respect for the film's quality production -- costumes, set, camera work, soundtrack, I give it this grade:
Hope you enjoyed this review!
