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After fuel-injecting class warfare into the horror film in the 1970s (Last House on the Left), defining the genre in the ’80s (A Nightmare on Elm Street), and catching the smart-ass dot-com zeitgeist with the Scream films, Wes Craven tries to smoosh together all the aforementioned with Cursed and comes out a big-ass crapper. Reportedly a troubled production requiring multiple reshoots and -edits, the movie’s first 30 minutes are an ugly, jittery mess that suggests the work of three Red Bull-ed assistant directors, not the past master of spatial unease. The film calms down a bit, but not enough so that the weight, hair color, and hairstyle of Christina Ricci—playing a talent wrangler on The Craig Kilborn Show bitten by a werewolf—don’t mismatch glaringly from shot to shot. There’s no real story; we just wait for Ricci to go wolf amid star cameos, out-of-time pop referencing, and proof yet again that a CGI monster is about as scary as a malevolent web site.

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