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Movie Review - The Cursed (2021)
May 15, 2023
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Horror movies don’t do much for me. Consequently, I don’t watch them very often. An over the top action movie appeals to my imagination, and an historical epic will inspire me. But a scary movie might make me jump in the moment (it might not, since I anticipate the scares) and then it’s gone. If I think about it after it’s over, it’s only at 3am on my way to the bathroom.

You know, exactly when you don’t want to think about monsters.

It’s not that I take issue with the horror genre itself, as I’ll happily (happily?) read H.P. Lovecraft long into the night, or listen to scary podcasts, or even dabble in writing spooking stories of my own. I suppose it’s more the medium. As I’ve said many times, the perfect movie for me is one with beautiful people, in exotic places, doing exciting things. The excitement in a horror movie isn’t the sort of thrill I’m looking for. 

Still, sometimes I’ll watch one anyway.

There was a stretch in my mid-20’s where I did a deep dive into the British horror films of the late 60’s and early 70’s, when the blood looked like pasta sauce and the fog was almost as thick. Sure the budgets were low and the acting was better suited for the stage, but everything was done with sincerity. Most of the films had some sort of folkloric element that appealed to me, and religion was usually the answer to confronting evil.

An exception is Witchfinder General (1968), an ugly, controversial, repulsive film.

When I recently put on The Cursed (originally titled Eight for Silver) I wasn’t thinking of those old movies. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t really know what to expect. The film opens during the first World War, when a group of British troops are chewed up by enemy machine guns. One of the men is taken to the hospital, and on the way we see the sort of butchery to which doctors on the field had to resort. The injured man has three bullets in his abdomen, but to the doctor’s surprise he removes four.

The last one is silver.

DUN, DUN, DUNNNNNN!

We jump back in time, to the late 1800’s and a manor house surrounded by the sort of fog that would make Hammer Film directors green with envy. The cast of characters is large, and unfortunately we don’t get to spend any significant amount of time with a single person. There’s the stern father Seamus (Alistair Petrie) and his lovelorn wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly), their two children, Charlotte (Amelia Crouch) and Edward (Max Mackintosh) and a bunch of village elders, who are up to no good.

Are they ever?

Seamus and the elders decide they want the land that the local Gypsies insist is their own and refuse to sell. So the elders do only only logical thing and hire mercenaries to come in to burn, torture, rape, kill, and bury alive the unwanted neighbors. But did I mention these are Gypsies? Nothing good will come of that. And nothing good does. The Gypsy wise woman knew this was coming and made (well, there’s no other way to put this) cursed silver dentures of doom (props to John Serba for coining the phrase, no pun intended). 

Jump ahead a few years.

All the local kids are having nightmares about the scarecrow left on the site of the massacre. The boldest of the bunch, Timmy (Tommy Roger), gathers them together to do something about it. Unfortunately, doing something means digging up the teeth, putting them in his mouth, and biting little Edward’s neck. Okay, so the last two steps weren’t Timmy’s plan, but once he saw the teeth he was possessed and couldn’t help himself. 

And then the monster attacks start. But in a twist, Timmy’s not the monster.

Pathologist with a past John McBride (Boyd Holbrook) arrives to investigate. Obviously, he’s the Van Helsing of the story, with more experience with this sort of thing than he initially lets on. We want him to be the main character and hero, but he arrives too late and doesn’t really get much of an arc. If writer/director/cinematographer Sean Ellis had narrowed his focus to a single character I think we might have gotten a more satisfying movie.

But we need to take a step back.

Note that McBride is a pathologist. While there are the requisite religious overtones, with holy ground thought to be a safe haven from the monster (spoiler: it’s not), and the silver for the teeth having come from the Original 30 Pieces, our monster hunter is a man of science. He’s no Solomon Kane, crazed Puritan on a mission from God, but more in the mold of Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, scientist. That itself isn’t problematic. But coupled with the ineffectiveness of spiritual protection in this world, I find it mildly disappointing.

Moving on.

Overall, I like the heavy, ominous atmosphere. The revisions to the werewolf mythology are grounded enough that I never felt cheated, simply intrigued. And like the horror movies of the late 60’s, Ellis makes the most of his limited budget. There’s lots of gore, with CGI replacing pasta sauce so that it’s only marginally more realistic. We get the idea, though, and that’s enough. 

One thing really bugged me.

There’s a scene late in the film when the monster attacks a maid while she’s hanging sheets. The edges of the screen waver with a weird distortion, and at first I thought it was the monster’s point of view, which made sense and I appreciated. But then we cut to looking at the creature, and the distortion remained. Maybe it was intended to replicate the sort of the buzz we feel in a moment of terror, but really it’s just to cover up the cheap visual effect. 

It was a choice, and one I don’t like. 

Small criticisms aside, I actually enjoyed The Cursed for its texture and theatricality. I didn’t expect a modern made Hammer Film, but that’s basically what it is: we’ve got old manor houses, Gypsy curses, sumptuous sets and costumes, and iffy effects. 

And fog. So much fog. 

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F1 is Modern Western

As a nation, the United States is unique. We don’t share a genetic heritage, but a creed. Americans and our ideas come from all over the world. But we’re at our best when take those outside ideas and make them our own. Everything we have came from another culture, but there was a time when we could take things and collectively make them better.

Democracy? Check. Rock’n’roll? Check. Heck! Chinese food? Yes, we did.

Don’t hate. You know I’m right.

One of the greatest art forms we’ve given the world is the western genre. While rooted in courtly romances of King Arthur, we took the idea of the man on horseback who makes things right on his quest for something spiritual and made it distinctly American. Most of the time, these stories aren’t historically accurate, but that’s not the point. They’re soaked in the American ethos. For better or for worse, the western has become the American myth, even more so than 1776.

And the cool thing about myths is that you can take them and tell other stories. 

Star Trek (and later Firefly) took the western to space. 

A few weeks ago I was able to see F1: The Movie on IMAX, and I had high hopes. Director Joseph Krasinski had proved himself with Top Gun: Maverick, which is about as American as a modern movie can get. But mostly, I just wanted to see if he could do with racecars what he’d done with fighter jets. In that regard, I was everything I’d hoped it would be. The idea of Americanism didn’t even cross my mind, since F1 is primarily a European sport.

Boy, was I surprised.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes with all the careless cool of Paul Newman in his prime and a Steve McQueen swagger. While Pitt has never played a cowboy and isn’t a racecar driver in real life, Newman and McQueen played both, and did both. Hayes has been keeping himself busy with no-name races since an F1 crash nearly killed him some 30 years before. But when Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old friend and rival, needs some wins to save the team, he tracks down Sonny.

And the old dog knows a few tricks.

Naturally, his tactics put him at odds with his teammate, Joshua Pierce (Damson Idris), and his cocky attitude is a big red flag to the team’s engineer, Kate McKenna (Kerry Conden). So the movie all the tropes of a sports film, and I don’t think I need to summarize further. But it’s not a sports film. Or rather, it’s not just a sports a film. Surprise, surprise, it’s the western myth transposed into a racing a story.

It’s spelled out in the trailer, but it didn’t strike me until the very end.

Kate calls Sonny Hayes an “old school rough and tumble cowboy” in a line used in the marketing. When he arrives in the garage, only Ruben knows him. Sonny is the stranger in town. Like James Garner in Support Your Local Sheriff, his method of restoring order and winning is unorthodox and effective. Like Shane, in that Alan Ladd classic, he’s guarded about his past. And like John Wayne in The Searchers and so many other westerns, Sonny Hayes is the outsider who must leave civilization once he’s made it civilized for those who belong there.

But he doesn’t.


Perhaps the hardboiled crime story, another uniquely American genre, is also an outgrowth of the western. Philip Marlow is the man who must walk down mean streets, who is not himself mean. As Raymond Chandler said, “He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.” Basically, the man he’s describing is dangerous, but not cruel. Dispassionate in taking revenge, and restrained by a code of honor.

But destined to be lonely, nonetheless.

Why we’ve made that an essential part of the American is a topic for another time. But there it is. And it’s the story of Sonny Hayes. At the end of the movie [SPOILER], he rides off into the sunset as the credits roll. The western isn’t dead. It’s still there, in essence, speaking to our hearts in different ways.

Nothing more American than that. 

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Girl-Power Isn't the Problem: Stop Treating Movies Like TV Pilots

Last weekend I was able to sneak off the theater for a screening of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina. Did I feel silly, telling the high school girl at the ticket counter, “One for Ballerina, and a small drink”? Well, not in the moment. 

I probably drank a liter of cherry vanilla Coke Zero, and that didn’t feel so great.

Plenty of box office analysts and Hollywood types are wracking their brains, trying to figure out why movies like Furiosa and Ballerina aren’t drawing huge crowds. Mad Max and John Wick are popular franchises, but apparently telling the stories of the women in those worlds isn’t working. Even if the movies are pretty good.

I’ve seen both, and they’re pretty good.

Some are arguing that no one will go near a movie that looks like it’s feminist girl-bossing. Others counter that movies like Alien and Kill Bill are female-led action films that were successful. Now, I’m not going to say that Ballerina is on par with those modern day classics. But I will say that, as a man watching the movie, it didn’t offend me. The movie never challenged me to confront any internalized misogyny. The small girl doesn’t take down John Wick in hand-to-hand combat.

Honestly, if you like franchise, whether you’re male or female, you should watch Ballerina.

In short, from a purely cinematic experience perspective, neither Furiosa nor Ballerina would be any better or worse with a male lead. Maybe that’s a hot take. But that’s mine, for whatever it’s worth. Well, okay, I wouldn’t watch a movie called Ballerina if it stared a dude. Nevertheless, I think you get my point. Petite women warriors aside, the plots and action are exactly as expected.

So what’s the deal?

Well, what no one seems to have noticed is that Ripley and The Bride weren’t replacing anyone. As we were watching their movies for the first time, we weren’t thinking about other characters for whom we already had a preference. Movies are more like TV than TV right now, and replacement characters have always been a hard sell, regardless of gender. We all remember Sam and Diane. Who still talks about Sam and Rebecca (even though Kirstie Alley won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the part)? I had to look up her name. 

No, they aren’t technically replacing them. It’s a spin-off, set in the same world.

Spin-offs tend to succeed when the characters are already well established (eg: Frasier). Furiosa and Ballerina are more like backdoor pilots, where new characters are dropped in for a single episode to sell us on the idea of a new show. This technique is very hit and miss on TV, and I can’t think of a single example of this working in a movie franchise. Film and television are very different mediums, and should be treated as such.

Still, if it doesn’t work on TV, it’s probably not gonna work at the movies. Not where new characters and spin-offs are concerned. 

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Maybe I’m just getting old, but it doesn’t feel like we had the thriving and distinct pop culture of past generations. Has there been a look or stye, or feeling, that defines this moment? Everything seems to have stagnated for the last twenty years. And it’s not as if I don’t pay attention. 

It’s making me nostalgic. 

Consequently, for the rest of the year, I’m prioritizing movies from 1995, the year I was twelve. At that time, my family didn’t really go to the theater, and when we did rent VHS tapes, more often than it is was older Disney movies or entirely forgettable Christian titles. Now that I’ve grown tired of trying to keep up with new releases, not there’s much worth watching anyway, it feels like a good time to catch up on those 30 year old movies that have become ingrained in what’s left of our pop culture.

So over on Criticless, I made a list.

Some of these are movies I’ve seen before, but not in a long time. Others will be first time watches for me. There’s really no rhyme or reason to what I put on my list. It’s just movies that either interest me, or are currently in my collection, sadly unwatched. As things become available on streaming, I may add to the list. And if I don’t get to everything before the end of the year, no big deal.

Hopefully, they aren’t going anywhere. 

I’ll be posting some reviews and analysis as I go, so be sure to follow me here. 

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