If you can believe pre-release reports, it took director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson three years to turn "Cursed" into a movie the studio deemed worthy of release. Maybe if they'd taken a few years more "Cursed" could be a movie audiences would deem worthy of watching.

This on-again, off-again horror movie is a mess — quite literally.

The filmmakers evidently couldn't decide whether they wanted this werewolf yarn to be funny or scary or funny-scary. In the end, "Cursed" is only sporadically funny and pretty scary-bad.

As you may have guessed, Craven and Williamson are clearly trying to apply their successful "Scream" formula onto the werewolf genre — and they've failed pretty spectacularly.

Christina Ricci stars as Ellie, an assistant to late-night talk-show host Craig Kilborn (an element that automatically dates the movie). Ellie and her teenage brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) were recently in a car accident, after which they witnessed the other victim (Shannon Elizabeth) being torn apart by some sort of wild animal. And the beast also injured them.

While the police are pinning the attack on a bear or mountain lion, Jimmy has correctly guessed that it was a werewolf. And as the two siblings start to show signs of becoming beasts themselves, they try to find just what — or who — attacked them.

The list of suspects is pretty long — Ellie's mysterious boyfriend (Joshua Jackson), an obnoxious publicist, a rival (Judy Greer), Ellie's suddenly interested co-worker (Michael Rosenbaum).

The whole tongue-in-cheek wolfman thing was done much better nearly 25 years ago with "An American Werewolf in London." And Rick Baker's creature effects really haven't progressed much.

Ricci appears to be going simply through the motions; Eisenberg is a little better, mainly because he has better dialogue.

"Cursed" is rated PG-13 for strong scenes of horror violence (werewolf attacks and some gunfire), occasional use of strong profanity, some fairly graphic gore, use of some crude sexual slang terms and some vulgar gestures, brief partial nudity (male and female), and some brief drug content (references to drug use). Running time: 96 minutes.

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