Rarely has any film been quote as aptly named as Wes Craven’s benighted werewolf movie. Written by his Scream (1996) scripter Kevin Williamson, it was intended to do for the venerable lycanthrope film what that film did for the clapped-out slasher film. Instead, we got a horribly compromise film, one tinkered with endlessly at the behest of its production company heads and one that no-one, least of all Craven, was happy with.

It seems a tad unfair to even try to criticise the film given how far from Craven and Williamson’s original conception it wandered but we can only judge it by what’s left. And what’s left is a slickly made film with a few decent jump scares (it’s Wes Craven after all) but which is often close to incoherent, boasting all of the failings of Scream (the annoying characters, overkill genre references, grating, “hip” dialogue) and none of its strengths (the werewolf film notably failed to reinvent the werewolf film in any meaningful way).

The film we see today under the title Cursed started out with a different cast and a somewhat different storyline. Filming began in March 2003 with Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg and Scream veteran Skeet Ulrich as three unrelated strangers brought together by a car crash in the Hollywood Hills after which they’re attacked by a werewolf. However, production soon stalled and didn’t restart for over a year, during which time it lost several of its cast members (among them Ulrich, Mandy Moore, Omar Epps and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)‘s Heather Langenkamp) to scheduling conflicts. Many were recast and the script rewritten. Producer Bob Weinstein of Dimension Films had been unhappy with the original material and ordered the film to be completely reshot, meaning the loss of Rick Baker’s original werewolf make-up effects which were replaced by inferior CGI and practical effects by KNB.

But that wasn’t the end of it – Weinstein decided at the last minute that the film, shot for an American ‘R’ rating with lashings of gore, needed to be trimmed for a more commercially viable PG-13. Craven later told the New York Post that “it was basically taken away from us and cut to PG-13 and ruined. It was two years of very difficult work and almost 100 days of shooting of various versions. Then at the very end, it was chopped up and the studio thought they could make more with a PG-13 movie, and trashed it… I thought it was completely disrespectful, and it hurt them too, and it was like they shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun.” The resulting film is, predictably, a disappointment.

Siblings Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg), who is still in high school, and Ellie Myers (Christina Ricci), an assistant on the TV talk show The Late Late Show, are involved in a traffic collision on Mulholland Drive and then attacked by a large animal. It turns out to be a werewolf and the curse has been passed on to the brother and sister – he uses it to best school bully Bo (Milo Ventimiglia) and she begins to suspect that the original monster is her boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson). But it turns out that there’s another werewolf on the loose and as the full moon rises, Jimmy and Ellie have to fight their own curse as well as the monsters.

Stocked with cameos from celebrities that were already on their way out of the public consciousness by the time the film was finally released in 2005 (Craig Kilborn, who didn’t mean all that much outside the States anyway, had left The Late Late Show a year before), lumbered with sub-standard special effects and peppered with one-liners like “people can change” that land with a leaden tump, Cursed really does betray the difficulties of its torturous birth. The CG werewolves are particularly awful, with no sense of “presence” or “weight” to them – even the pixilated lycanthropes in An American Werewolf in Paris (1997), previously the gold standard for CGI werewolf awfulness.

But not everything can be blamed on the reshoots – the characters are paper thin and likely always were giving the young cast very little to work with (Ricci in particular gives just about the blandest performance in her career), the idea that lycanthropy can be sexually transmitted (“there’s no such thing as safe sex with a werewolf”) is thrown away almost immediately it’s raised and the mystery of who the werewolf is so transparent that the film gives up and reveals it an hour in, switching the element of surprise to the fact that there are two lycanthropes on the loose. Elsewhere, the high school wrestling scene is worryingly reminiscent of Teen Wolf (1985), a comparison that one very much doubts either Craven or Williamson would have wanted anyone to make.

Cursed is too well made to be completely dismissed out of hand – even Craven’s worst films (and The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1984), Deadly Friend (1986), and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) are, in many ways, arguably worse than this – always look good and in this instance we have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that the original version of the film, which Craven said was 90% finished, would have been better. There have been inevitable calls on social media to have the original version released though so far the closest anyone’s got to it is seeing a two minutes longer “unrated” cut on DVD, but even that is just a longer version of the existing film. If a film about sibling werewolves is the only thing that’ll scratch your film-watching itch tonight, then the infinitely better Ginger Snaps films are definitely your best port of call.