Bullet Points: The Cursed
I missed Halloween by a few weeks but it’s never too late to watch a good murderous creature movie. I mean, I could have easily just watched Predator again. I have seen it hundreds of times and have never regretted it once but sometimes you need to slide out of that comfort zone and check in on something a little different. The Cursed is a movie that originally came to my attention after becoming best friends with star Brad Thornton back at the HorrorHound Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio. I was there to see his newest flick Interstellar Civil War, and he was cool enough to chat with me for a few minutes about martial arts and movies (someday you’ll hear that interview). I’ve been meaning to catch up with this horror/thriller flick for a while now and I can finally say that I’m not at all sad that I didn’t watch Predator for the 10,000th time.
Synopsis: Writer Denny White (Brad Thornton) moves to a small Tennessee town to finish his book on Southern supernatural happenings and finds that not all of them are made up by stupid rednecks. A string of murders and cattle mutilations leads him to a man who knows that the creature behind these killings is both demonic and ancient. Denny teams up with Sheriff Muldoon (Louis Mandylor) to stop the menace before he kills every person in town.
- Back in the Day: The film opens with a short scene showing a family in Warren County, Tennessee, circa 1968. The little girl roams off into the woods looking for a conniving cat and gets mauled by some unseen creature. Mommy finds a severed hand, screams, and then runs inside to check her family life insurance policies. Okay, I made that last part up, but the scene does two things: 1) there is something that is killing people in Warren County, regardless of how innocent they might look and 2) this thing has been killing people for several decades at the minimum. Shit is about to get real.
- Credit Info: The opening credits are actually pretty cool. They show a bunch of newspaper clippings from over the years with both animal and non-animal killings that lead us to believe that not only have these things been happening for some time now but that someone with half a brain should have noticed it. C’mon people!
- Denny: Everyone knows that Denny’s is one of the best restaurants to go to after a full day of drinking but who knew that there were any heroic dudes named Denny running around. Denny White is played by Brad Thornton of Kickboxer 4: The Aggressor fame, and while he doesn’t have an awesome name like “Lando Smith” or “Starslayer Burk”, Denny White does something in this small Tennessee town that I find very commendable; he immediately shacks up with the hottest girl in town. Whew…Francesca Cecil is one of the hottest librarians in movie history. The hot librarian is one of those boys fantasies that I feel has fallen by the wayside with the rise of the online/Wikipedia generation. Poor kids don’t know what they’re missing.
- Where’s the Beef: A local rancher loses a bunch of cattle and the bloodshed begins with a slight bang on The Cursed. New Sheriff Lloyd Muldoon (Louis Mandylor) keeps telling everyone that he’s working an investigation but he doesn’t seem to be doing much other than responding to murders and being really angry. The murders do hit close to home for the Sheriff and soon he’s dealing with angry townspeople as well as his own desire to find and stop the evil from spreading throughout the town.
- Redneck Posse: At times, The Cursed really reminded me of a werewolf-less version of Silver Bullet. I have always been a big fan of that particular Stephen King adaptation so it was a big compliment to The Cursed that they looked similar. We get the mysterious nighttime attacks. Community meetings followed by redneck hunting posses, and then final showdowns that involve several members of the cast. The crippled Corey Haim is replaced by martial arts master Brad Thornton here, but I feel the lack of drunken Gary Busey makes them about even. I wish there had been a larger band of rednecks to go out hunting for the creature but sometimes you have to take what you can get.
- Butthole Face: I’m just going to come out and say it; this creature looks like he has an asshole for a mouth. When he’s screaming or he has it open it actually looked pretty damn cool but it looked too much like someone glued a drink coaster to that guy’s face for met to take him seriously. All of the attacks come at night so it won’t be as noticeable but if you squint enough you’ll be able to see that guy’s asshole through the mist. That might be the first and last time I’ll ever type that sentence.
- Tell Me More: Denny and Sheriff Muldoon start getting more info from an old man in a retirement home. He’s the man with all the knowledge about the situation but no one has been listening to him for years. Once Denny and the Sheriff realize what has to be done they gear up with Denny’s friend Bill’s gun collection and head over to the old Civil War Era plantation that still looks AMAZING to take out the creature. The finale was better than I expected it to be. I was still a bit curious as to why we were given certain bits of information about Denny and Sheriff Muldoon that never paid off in the end (Denny used to work for some secret government shit and Muldoon had the classic younger brother jealousy thing going) but I couldn’t complain too much with the way the movie finished. From reading some of the reviews online I think I am one of the few people who liked the ending. Thanks John!
Before you get all worked up and scared of the dark, check out these bonus Bullet Points:
- I was always told that if you wanted to find a good woman you needed to check out the library. I guess I should have listened to them.
- I never knew I wanted to see James Marshall so bad in my life. I didn’t recognize his name during credits but I couldn’t help but notice that the Gladiator star was playing Denny’s good buddy Bill. If you know anything about horror movies then you know that good friends never make it, but Gladiator James Marshall would have kicked this creature’s ass!
- Costas Mandylor plays the older brother and Sheriff at the beginning of the movie. Each of his scenes feature him chopping wood. He needs to invest in a chainsaw.
- So many fog machines were used in this movie.
The Verdict: The Cursed is better than many of the SyFy movies that I’ve seen over the years. It seemed that the writers tried a little too hard to connect everyone in the town to the history at points without any real payoff but the movie didn’t suffer much in the end for it. The Mandylor brothers and Brad Thornton had enough machismo to carry the movie but my biggest problem with the film was that it never showed much in the way creature’s devastation. It made the creature a bit less threatening to me to not see what it left in its wake. As far as these creature horror/Syfy movies go, you could do much, much worse.
