With the advent of deluxe DVD special editions and home theater systems so loud they register on the Richter scale, the only reason to go to a theater is for the experience of seeing a film with a hundred or so strangers. And what an experience it is, especially with a movie like Cursed, a tepid werewolf movie that was originally rated R, but re-cut so it could be sold to the screeching, giggly and yet highly profitable 13-to-17-year-old crowd. In the span of 96 minutes, the audience at the screening of Cursed I attended violated every rule of movie etiquette and then some. There were the requisite cell phone calls and loud conversations, along with, somewhat inexplicably, a group of girls taking pictures of each other during the trailers. Halfway through the movie, a girl two rows in front of me loudly offered the theater the rest of her popcorn.

But I couldn't really blame them for such obnoxious behavior because most big studio horror flicks don't respect the audience either. That the movie was plagued with script problems and was re-shot, re-cut and shelved for nearly a year is one of many reasons why Cursed deserves to be talked through. It's a disappointing, weak effort from director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson, who brilliantly mocked the slasher genre in 1996's Scream. Through some Bizarro Hollywood logic, instead of forcing studios to look for new and original horror projects, Scream inspired a host of painful, clich??d fright flicks throughout the late '90s that all seemed to feature the same rotating cast of teen actors.

It's fitting, then, that Cursed plays out like some dusty artifact from a time when we were buying dot-com stocks and the president was getting blowjobs in the Oval Office. All the usual suspects from the '90s are here. Christina Ricci is the heroine, Ellie, a wide-eyed and vulnerable production assistant for Craig Kilborn's late-night show. Joshua Jackson of "Dawson's Creek" fame is Jake, Ellie's gravely serious boyfriend with a reputation as a ladies' man. Driving through the Hollywood hills one night, Ellie and her nerdy brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg) hit some kind of animal on the road. Ellie swerves across the road and slams into another car, knocking it into a ditch. Ellie and Jimmy venture into the bushes to help Becky (Shannon Elizabeth) out of the wreck, but their rescue efforts are cut short when a giant wolf eats Becky and bites Ellie and Jimmy. The two siblings venture home, and it's not long before strange things start happening-Jimmy wakes up naked in the bushes and Ellie has creepy dreams about Jake. With the aid of the Internet and a handful of comic books, Jimmy quickly surmises he and Ellie were bitten by a werewolf and are now cursed. They have all the classic symptoms of lycanthropy: heightened senses, super strength, an increased "sexual aura" and an aversion to silver. To end the curse, they've got to kill the werewolf that bit them, a seemingly daunting task until a fortuneteller (Portia de Rossi) tells Ellie the wolfman is someone close to her.

You've probably already figured out who the werewolf is by reading the above paragraph, and that's the problem with Cursed. It's predictable and hokey, completely lacking scares, surprises or subtlety. Following one plot twist, a character remarks, "I guess there's no such thing as safe sex with a werewolf," and for a moment, it seems like Williamson and Craven are trying to give the film at least a little depth. But then the werewolf shows up and flips the bird to a bunch of cops, and it's clear that Cursed was made with cell-phone gabbing 13-year-olds squarely in mind.