Sean Ellis’ vivid, rich horror movie has startling practical effects and a real eye for spooky images, but it leans too much on a racist trope and familiar elements like creepy nursery rhymes and repetitive nightmares. In theaters now.
Sean Ellis' werewolf movie "The Cursed" tarts itself up a bit with 19th-century gothic imagery and a steady atmospheric gloom, but the script, which Ellis also wrote, can't escape most of the worst cliches of the genre, and its earnestness alone can't keep it from being pretty insipid.
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