What’s there left to do with a werewolf movie? The Cursed opens locally this weekend, and while I applaud its efforts to do something different, it winds up being another horror film that’s long on mood and short on payoff. The main story takes place in rural France in the 1880s. When a land baron named Laurent
Amelia Crouch, Alistair Petrie and cast in Eight for Silver
Brooding and baleful, even if it loses bite after a strong opening.
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Boyd Holbrook plays a late 19th century pathologist investigating a violent curse laying waste to landowners and villagers in Sean Ellis reanimation of the werewolf legend.
Writer-director Sean Ellis revisits the werewolf legend as a fogbound descent into Victorian Gothic in
Eight for Silver. Led by Boyd Holbrook as a pathologist in the late 1800s who knows a thing or two about nightmarish curses, stalking lycanthropic beasts and family tragedy, the film is more suspenseful than scary, higher on sustained atmosphere than well-rounded characters. But it moves along at a stately pace and remains involving, driven by eerie ambient music, soupy chiaroscuro visuals and sporadic bursts of blood, gore and body horror. It won’t disturb Lon Chaney Jr. in his grave, but still offers meat for genre fans to chew on.