There’s No Such Thing As Safe Sex With A Werewolf

Year: 2005

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, Joshua Jackson

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

There’s a reason Wes Craven took a six year break from feature filmmaking after 2005. Two of his films came out that year. One was the excellent airborne thriller Red Eye. The other was Cursed, a Kevin Williamson-penned werewolf thriller. On paper, it’s a match made in Heaven. The duo had previously collaborated on the massively successful Scream trilogy, which reinvented the slasher genre. Why not do the same thing with Craven’s first foray into werewolf mythology?

There was just one little thing in the way… The Weinstein Company. What should have been a nice and easy teenybopper shoot grotesquely stretched into a two and a half year nightmare of reshooting, rewriting, recasting, and general meddlesome nonsense that twisted the film into a wholly unrecognizable form. It started off as a normal movie, but ended up a misshapen monster.

I suppose the real werewolf is the movie itself.

In Cursed, Ellie Myers (Christina Ricci) is a late night talk show producer who takes care of her high school-aged brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg, already Social Networking it up) after their parents died. She is dating Jake (Joshua Jackson), a lothario who is opening a horror-themed club (because Kevin Williamson), and who has been pulling away as of late, much to her chagrin. After Ellie and Jimmy get into a car accident, they witness a young woman (Shannon Elizabeth) being mauled by a giant wolf, and both of them get scratched in the process.

Over the next two days, during the full moon, they begin to exhibit increasingly wolfish tendencies. Ellie is freaked out by her sudden aggression and attraction to blood, but Jimmy has a great time Teen Wolfing it up with his heightened sexual charisma a (AKA flat-ironed hair. This was 2005, after all) and newfound athletic prowess. But a werewolf keeps attacking people around town. Is it one of them? The original wolf that cursed them? Or somebody else entirely?

You know how it is in Hollywood. Every waiter you get is either an aspiring actor or a werewolf.

Although it’s almost impossible to discern a film in the finished product of Cursed, there is a 100-minute block of images and sound in front of us, so let’s talk about it.

The two year delay didn’t help much, but even in 2003 Cursed would have felt way too 90’s. Kevin Williamson’s particular brand of postmodern winking worked in 1996, but sarcasm’s lease hath all too short a date. Cursed is chock full of weird rock band cameos (go Bowling for Soup!), movie references, and too-polished teenspeak, stuff which was getting unfashionable by the time the millennium rolled around, but in the post-Saw period was downright humiliating.

And I hate to say it, but the script just isn’t very good. Obviously, it has been cobbled together from about 19 different drafts, which would explain the jumbled structure, the jerry-rigged romance between Ricci and Jackson, and the two finales in a row that proudly contradict each other. But the script is putrid all the way down to the dialogue, and there just ain’t no excuse for that.

Most of the teen scenes are preoccupied with exuberant homophobia, culminating in this mid-wrestling match gem: “You know the best thing about being a fairy? Getting to fly,” which is deeply offensive on both a personal and a syntactical level. Cursed is packed with this kind of anemic quippage (my personal favorite being “You’re playing games with us… Well, play this!”), finally exhausting Williamson’s seemingly endless reserves of arch wit. It’s telling that he too would retreat from motion pictures for over half a decade following Cursed’s release.

It seems like this film really was… cursed.

Pretty much everything in Cursed is underwhelming, but it’s difficult to pinpoint a central problem within the infinite vicious cycle of blame. The actors are subpar (especially the bland Ricci and Portia de Rossi, who is hideously miscast as an ominous fortune teller) because their characters were crumbling beneath them as the script was cannibalized by the writer, who was working with a harried director, who was being squashed under the pressure of producers, who didn’t like the script, and on and on and on. It’s an unsolvable Sphinx riddle. At this point, it would have been better if it hadn’t gotten a release at all.

All that being true, it must be said that while nothing in Cursed could really be called good, it’s not quite so rotten as I’m making it sound. Sure, it’s a wretched, hybridized monstrosity, but during the bulk of its run time it’s merely mediocre rather than actively terrible. Craven manages to milk some suspense out of several sequences, especially in the initial wolf attack, which features a jump scare that is the single most effective scene in the film. His stalk sequences see him pulling a lot of old tricks out of his toolbag (scraping claws a la Freddy Krueger, things subtly going wrong in an increasingly dream logic manner), but there’s a reason they were put in there in the first place: They work.

Cursed also features a terrific entry in the Craven/Williamson canon of loony killer reveals when the werewolf turns out to be [SPOILERS Judy Greer], who gives the best performance in the film once outed as a psychopath, final proving that there was something comedic lodged in the script that could actually click when a performer got a crack at it. This scene also provides the second best moment of the film, some werewolf body shaming that is deliciously over-the-top and lampoons the Hollywood lifestyle at a level the movie had been feebly attempting to reach for an hour and change.

The only thing that never ever works in Cursed is the werewolf itself, which feels like a pretty big oversight. While the original effects were provided by FX genius Rick Baker, who pulled off An American Werewolf in London without anything remotely resembling the technology of 2003. Yet for some unfathomable reason he was yanked from the project and replaced by KNB, whose work would be plastered over with crappy CGI. To be fair, the computer work here is a smidge better than a lot of recent lazy CGI (here’s lookin’ at you, The Hobbit), but the werewolf looks far too much like Bobo the Bear to be menacing.

Seriously, they could be brothers.

With that, let’s leave Cursed to rot in peace. It’s a pitiful creation that doesn’t deserve all the stellar people who worked on it. It’s not the worst film of Craven’s filmography, but it’s the one where his creativity and humanity are least apparent, which is far more damning than simply being crappy.

TL;DR: Cursed is an endlessly fiddled-with film that wouldn’t have been good in its original form.
Rating: 5/10
Word Count: 1150

Men In Tights

Year: 2016

Director: Zack Snyder

Cast: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams

Run Time: 2 hours 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

F**k Christopher Nolan, am I right? The man is pretty much solely responsible for the current whiplash dichotomy in superhero movies today. It’s either the peppy smirking of the Marvel empire or the dour bleakness of DC, and that’s entirely the result of the success of Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. And while I admit the first two are good films, the gritty superhero genre already folded up its own ass with the uniquely baffling Dark Knight Rises. Yet they keep on pumping this crap out.

The thing is, when a Marvel movie is bad, at least it still has a sense of fun (it’s no coincidence that Marvel’s biggest recent failure, the Fox-produced abortion Fantastic Four, is also the darkest film in their slate). There’s a bit of that comic booky cotton candy flavor that at least makes it bearable. Unfortunately, “fun” is a four-letter word when we’re in Zack Snyder’s wheelhouse, even when presenting a team-up that has been caramelizing in comic book fans’ fevered imaginations for half a century: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

The court case of the century.

In BvS, Batman (Ben Affleck) is the vigilante alter ego of Bruce Wayne, a wealthy playboy whose company was turned to rubble during the highly destructive Zod battle at the end of Man of Steel. He has since vowed revenge on the caped crusader what wrought this devastation. Batman lives in Gotham, a crime-riddled city located just across the river from the bustling Metropolis, in a lunatic bit of comic book world-building that has no place in this relentlessly serious film.

Metropolis is the home of Superman (Henry Cavill), who works as a reporter for the Daily Planet as his alter ego Clark Kent. His elaborate disguise, a pair of glasses, is even more ridiculous considering that even wearing a suit and a nerdy tie, Cavill looks like a WWE wrestler crammed into a tube sock. Anyway, Superman has a distaste for batman because he’s been running around f**king branding people like he’s Immortan Joe. I think that’s fair.

Anyway, when Superman’s girlfriend Lois Lane (Amy Adams) – who sucks at everything she tries to do, constantly tripping into life-threatening situations – gets a hard-hitting interview with a Middle Eastern crime boss (her first and only question: “Are you a terrorist?” Now that’s journalism!), things go south and Superman saves her. For some reason totally obscured by a poorly edited action sequence, Superman is blamed for several deaths and called to trial by Senator Finch (Holly Hunter) as the public begins to doubt their trust in this literal superman who could crush their skulls without breaking a sweat if he wants to.

This crisis is being whipped into a frenzy by wealthy magnate Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg), who is the screenwriter’s mouthpiece for approximately a quarter of a billion twitchy monologues about the stunted themes the film tries to force on us about power and man’s goodness or whatever. Also Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) shows up to toss in some Justice League promo, but she has fewer than twenty lines and exists solely to be hit by things, only to swing her hair in sexy slomo as the dust clears to reveal that she’s indestructible.

Go feminism!

Oh man, where the hell do I begin? I suppose we should start with the obvious controversy: Ben Affleck as Batman. The masses were certainly upset by this decision, but I have no beef with the man. He turns in a solid world-weary performance, and he’s about as impossibly, gay porn buff as Cavill so at least our heroes match.

The real problem is that the actual character of Batman is spectacularly ill-defined. Other than a needless repetition of his “dead parents” backstory, this Batman is nothing but a haphazard collection of iconography the film assumes we already know (Alfred, batmobile, Bat signal, etc.). But this ain’t a continuation of Christian Bale’s character. This is an entirely new personality that we are given no face time with because this is through and through just a Superman sequel. But Affleck? No, he’s not even a blip on the radar of the tremendously bad things this movie provides in spades.

While we’re on the topic of casting, let’s talk Lex Luthor. Jesse Eisenberg is not Lex Luthor. And I don’t mean that in the “oh, he’s not bald, oh he’s too young” wailing tone of the hopelessly obsessed comic canon advocates. I mean he’s the single worst casting choice made by a major motion picture studio in perhaps a dozen years. And I actually like Jesse Eisenberg. But his work here is a plumb embarrassing retread of his Mark Zuckerberg persona (The Social Network weighs heavily on Luthor’s characterization in this universe) performed via a weak Robin Williams impersonation, rapidly shifting from silly voice to silly voice in a palsied, irritating frenzy, sometimes just kind of yipping like a Chihuahua for no reason. It’s bad, you guys.

He makes Kylo Ren look like genius casting.

It’s not like any of the cast is up to any truly great work (Cavill contents himself with strangled teeth-gnashing, Adams is profoundly boring – though she’s given zilch to do, and a random extra gives a portentous line reading with all the misplaced emphasis of a second grader attempting to read Shakespeare aloud), but Eisenberg sinks every scene like a cement brick. It doesn’t exactly help that the film hangs on his every word like it’s the divine gospel.

Actually, that’s a problem inherent to the entire film, and to Zack Snyder’s career if you think about it. Whether Batman is decrypting a hard drive or Lois is checking into a hotel, the film treats it like The Single Most Important Thing That Has Ever Happened. My problems with this are twofold. 1) They ignore the actual most important scene (Superman cooking breakfast shirtless), and 2) if everything is important, nothing is important. Junkie XL’s percussive score worked for Mad Max: Fury Road because every frame of that movie is the most exciting thing ever filmed. But here it just drives home how unimpressive nearly everything you’re watching actually is.

And boy is this film just a pile of unimpressive nonsense. When it’s not overexplaining itself like you’re 8 years old (“I need Kryptonite. I’ve got to get back to Gotham. Because that’s where the Kryptonite is.”), it’s launching into an inscrutable barrage of gobbledygook that is either forced promo for Justice League films three years down the line or one of a million useless dream sequences that endlessly repeat the film’s puerile themes. 

And the action scenes for which the film was ostensibly created are too-dark jumbles of half-hearted punching with absolutely no juice. Plus, you know how people complain about Hollywood movies being all explosions and no plot? Well, if you took every explosion from one of those movies and crammed them together, you would have a single frame of Batman v Superman, which at certain points seems to take place in a whirling firestorm. You sometimes can’t even see the action through the smokescreen of orange and yellow flames.

Let’s take a moment to relax and realize that the substandard action makes sense when you remember that the movie is actually just gay porn.

I suppose the biggest flaw of Batman v Superman is that it’s at odds with itself, attempting to be both a superhero battle film and a hoo-rah teamup Justice League prequel. The reason there’s almost zero motivation to their fight is that they have less than half a movie before they have to be BFFs, [SPOILERS which would explain Batman’s on-a-dime turnaround during the patently ridiculous scene where he discovers that Superman also has a mom named Martha. That’s even more embarrassing to write down than it was to watch.]

This weakens the already thin characterizations, leaving us with nothing but a bombastic sludge of dreary overexertion, filled with deeply unthreatening villains, a preponderance of sloooooow ominous zooms, and a rich undercurrent of misogyny that may or may not especially hate Asian women for no discernible reason.

Oh, and because this is leading to an Avengers-style team movie, we have a handful of attempts at quips and winking barbs that either fall flat from the get-go (like the syntactically spurious “Firm grip. You should not pick a fight with this person.”) or were so clearly retrofitted to be in the trailer that they reek of flop sweat (the famous “Is she with you?” “I thought she was with you!” exchange re: Wonder Woman actively defies pre-established plot mechanics).

But I suppose I should say something nice about the film before I get the hell out of here. The opening credits are pretty. Well, not the actual font, which is punishingly bland, but the sequence that they play over has some interesting visuals. And a couple images that deify Superman actually deserve the film’s pretentions of grandeur. But the single best thing about the film was that it definitely didn’t feel 2 ½ hours long, so I must have enjoyed it on some level. Right?

There’s a scene in Batman v Superman where a woman discovers a jar of piss on her desk, which causes her to babble incoherently. I couldn’t think of a more perfect analogy for this review. Don’t see Batman v Superman if you can help it. Don’t let my sacrifice go to waste.

TL;DR: Batman v Superman isn’t the worst superhero flick ever made, but that doesn’t mean it’s not infuriating.

Rating: 4/10

Word Count: 1608
Reviews In This Series
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Snyder, 2016)
Suicide Squad (Ayer, 2016)

Pot Secret

Year: 2015

Director: Nima Nourizadeh

Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Connie Britton

Run Time: 1 hour 36 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I am far from a sucker for stoner comedy. Cheech and Chong blow right through me. Apatow’s tittering cronies hardly phase this old square. But when I saw the trailer for American Ultra, it tickled me. This looked like a film that wasn’t just content to pander in goofy munchies antics, but actually engage intelligently and – most importantly – ludicrously with them. I was all in.

Sometimes you take a gamble and it doesn’t pay off. Sometimes you hit it big. Sometimes you bet ten dollars and win back eight dollars. American Ultra was a little like that last one. I will take a perfectly strange film over a perfectly adequate film every time, but when it’s the latter (as American Ultra certainly is), it’s pretty hard to complain about that.

Alas, but I will. I mean, what are blogs for?

But first, the pot. Plot. I mean plot. In American Ultra, Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) is an unmotivated stoner living with his girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart). Unbeknownst to him he is also a sleeper agent. When the government, led by Adrian Yates (Topher Grace), decides to terminate him, his creator Victoria Lasseter (Connie Britton) rebels. In an effort to save is life, she activates him, but his weed-addled mind doesn’t give him the whole picture. He now has incredible fighting and firearm skills, but no memory of how he acquired them.

You get the picture. Screwup stoner can suddenly pull James Bond moves, but he’s confused and terrified as to why. Really, it’s a great concept. When a cadre of other “assets” arrives to destroy him, he and Phoebe fight back with startling aplomb.

Also Tony Hale is there because he’s awesome.

First off, this film doesn’t earn itself any favors by beginning at the end, a structural gimmick that barely works at the best of times and completely spoils itself at the worst. At the very least, American Ultra finds a middle ground between these two camps with an interesting reversal, but it still has the effect of watching the trailer right before the film. You’re just sitting around waiting for certain shots and situations to appear, not actually focusing on the story or letting it draw you in.

Approaching the film with that bias already in place is far from helpful, considering that American Ultra does everything in its power to prevent you from being drawn in. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a potentially wonderful film being strangled by producers in real time before, but that’s exactly what’s happening here. They engage with the concept like it’s a dead cockroach, buffering the truly buoyant moments with wads of painfully generic action sequences, a mid-film twist that unnecessarily complicates things, and a totally frivolous John Leguizamo cameo. I love the man, but the ham he is asked to sling weighs down the film like an anvil.

I’m sorry, John. I loved you in To Wong Foo.

But beneath that flaky coat of doldrums lies a deeply original, fun action comedy. You can’t pitch a movie as “stoner version of The Bourne Identity” and not have it come out at least a little kooky. Like I said, American Ultra seems oddly restrained in its promise of delivering weed gags atop a genre framework, like an adult hesitating to tell their parents about some mischief they pulled back in high school, but when it clicks it’s intelligent and hilarious. Gags can be simultaneously juvenile and wryly satirical, yet still gut-tickling no matter at which level you choose to receive it.

A lot of these clicking moments can be attributed to the leads, whose chemistry is as perfect as the time that guy accidentally invented matches. I mean, who knew Eisenberg and Stewart were so right for each other? And yeah yeah, Adventureland is a thing, but who actually liked that movie? What makes their casting in American Ultra so brilliant is the routes their careers have taken since that time. Kristen Stewart has stepped onto the reluctantly presented indie pedestal, and Eisenberg has some Oscarbait under his belt.

His progression has allowed them to relax while handling Blockbuster comedy roles, applying newfound skills to their approach. While some might argue that Kristen Stewart playing a stoner is as obvious as Kirk Cameron playing a crazed zealot, she tackles this role with a surprising zeal. A good comedy can be measured by the relative quality of its emotional extremes, and she rides between those tones like she’s in the X Games.

Are those still a thing? I’m not thirteen anymore, so I wouldn’t know.

Jesse Eisenberg matches and exceeds Stewart, completely externalizing the twitchy, anxious frivolity of the script at its best. Most of the film’s funniest moments belong to him, and not just because he plays the protagonist. His portrayal avoids caricature, encapsulating one guy and his tics like a mosquito in amber.

OK, before I bury you under any more similes, let’s wrap this up. American Ultra is a light, pleasant comedy film with action that occasionally rears its head to be clever. It won’t rock your world, but it will cheer you up. What more can you ask for, really? And look at it this way. If you rent this movie, that’s one more excuse not to watch You Don’t Mess With the Zohan. You’re welcome.

TL;DR: American Ultra is a pleasant but unchallenging Hollywood comedy.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 923