The Curse

The Curse appears to be nothing more than an excuse to present some unusually distasteful special effects and make-up. It certainly isn’t much as a horror movie, lacking any semblance of suspense or atmosphere.

The original element is the setting, rural Tennessee, where a sensitive adolescent boy (Wil Wheaton, the star of Stand by Me) lives with his mother and stepfather (Claude Akins). It’s never quite explained about the boy’s real father, or why the mother would remarry such a crude man (and he’s crude as only Claude Akins can be crude). But then many things in this movie are never quite explained.

One night, while the mother is out in the barn making hay with one of the ranch hands (this is never quite explained), a meteor comes crashing down on the farm. Wheaton thinks it’s suspicious, since it oozes slime that goes directly into the water table, but a well-meaning doctor neighbor concludes that the thing is merely the contents of the airliner’s bathroom tank, jettisoned in midair and frozen on the way down.

No way. Wheaton and the audience, having seen a lot of horror movies, know better. Our young hero notices that the taps water begins to taste weird, and the cows are breaking out in disgusting boils. The farm’s vegetables are full of worms and colorful liquids, and Mom, who’s been happily lapping up the water, begins to act funny – funny like a cleaver-wielding maniac, that is.

Needless to say, no one listens to Wheaton when he tries to tell the outside world about all this. But he wisely drinks his water from the neighbor’s garden hose, and avoids eating the tainted food, until he can convince the well-meaning doctor neighbor (whose sexy wife is involved in a never-quite-explained real-estate scam) that something is terribly wrong.

The Curse is heavy on grotesquerie and down-home crassness. Presumably this comes from first-time director David Keith, best known as an actor. In his acting, Keith has always favored the drawling good ol’ boy, most notably as the buddy in An Officer and a Gentleman, and he revels in the opportunity to display a redneck sensibility here. He also appears in a cameo on TV, as a cowboy singer warbling an awful country-western song.

This is the kind of movie made by an actor who wants to be a director, and has determined to learn the craft from the bottom up. Usually the idea is to move on to loftier projects, but frankly it appears that dreaming up gross ways of having vegetables explode makes Keith just as happy as a tick on a hound in July, so we may see him dwelling in this region for a while.

First published in The Herald, January 14, 1988

Keith directed an Indiana Jones spoof-thing, The Further Adventures of Tennessee Buck, the following year, and then one other film. David Chaskin’s screenplay appears to have been inspired, in an uncredited way, by H.P. Lovecraft’s story The Color Out of Space. We should credit the actress who plays Wil Wheaton’s mom in this movie, since I did not name her: Kathleen Jordon Gregory. This is her only screen credit. Spooky! The music is by Franco Micalizzi, who did They Call Me Trinity, lots of Italian police films, and a piece regularly used on Curb Your Enthusiasm. A movie music career is a strange thing. Do I remember this film? I do not.