Cursed, The (2010)
Steve Barton
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Reviewed by The Foywonder
Starring Costas Mandylor, Louis Mandylor, Brad Thornton, Francesca Cecil, Josie Davis, James Marshall
Directed by Joel Bender
An uninteresting guy returns to his uninteresting small town and begins romancing an uninteresting beauty while uninterestingly researching the town’s uninteresting history to unravel the uninteresting mystery surrounding an uninteresting demon uninterestingly killing livestock and uninteresting citizens.
Have I mentioned how uninteresting this movie is?
Director Joel Bender can certainly light a scene to create a spooky visual but falls flat when it comes to creating an atmosphere of dread you can feel. The closest he ever comes is an almost eerie backlit night shot in which the demon dumps a severed cow’s head on the leading man’s car. That the uninteresting events unfold at a snail’s pace also does not help matters.
A demon has haunted Warren County, Tennessee, for decades. The reason why is attributed to a curse. You probably guessed that much just by looking at the film’s title. The wrathful demon looks a bit like “The X Files” Flukeman dressed like Darkman (sans the hat). I had no problem with the design of this creature aside from the blurry ghostly visuals when it attacked, making it almost impossible to tell what it was doing to its victims most of the time.
Don’t typically see movie monsters with a scolex for a mouth, either. For my money we need more movie monsters with scolexes. For all you monster moviemakers out there, we need more scolex.
The explanation behind the town’s curse requires finding an old black man in face make-up that gives his skin the same texture as a dried-up pumpkin. Between the bad make-up and the over-the-top old black Southerner accent, you’d swear it was Eddie Murphy or Dave Chappelle doing a sketch comedy routine.
One does have to give credit to the filmmakers for being bold enough to kill off most of their cast long before the third act. Costas Mandylor of the Saw franchise is the town sheriff. Josie Davis, the non-Nicole Eggert sister from “Charles in Charge”, is his wife. Don’t go out of your way to watch this film if you’re only interested in seeing them. They don’t even make it out of the first act.
Costas Mandylor’s kid brother, Louis, has a larger role as the deputy kid brother of his real-life brother, taking up the cause to find out what happened to his brother and sister-in-law. His investigation and interaction with local hicks also proves quite uninteresting.
Most everything revolves around generic leading man Denny (the bland Brad Thornton) and dull leading lady Sara (Francesca Cecil, her fake Southern accent is quite awful), his uninteresting scrolling through old newspaper clippings chronicling mysterious deaths and disappearances in the county over the past decades, their uninteresting conversations and romance, and, eventually, their uninteresting sex. Thornton is such an uninteresting actor that even as he watches the monster die a horrible death, he looks on with a blank expression that can only be described as bored intensity.
That’s pretty much how I watched The Cursed – minus the intensity.
1 out of 5
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