The 10 Worst Wes Craven Movies

For two-thirds of its running time, Red Eye had us believing that Craven had a little bit of Alfred Hitchcock’s spirit coursing through his veins.

Taking place mostly on a plane and focusing on two faces, those of Rachel MacAdams’ unsuspecting heroine and Cillian Murphy’s assassin-in-hiding, Craven’s straightforward thriller starts off heavily paranoid and enhances into a claustrophobic battle of wits. Heading into the film’s final act, one would think that the gore-master had made a modern-day, gender-neutral Strangers On A Train.

That’s before the plane lands and Red Eye digresses into a braindead action show that feels like the worst episode of 24 never filmed. The actors’ crisp performances can’t even save Craven’s inability to orchestrate high-stakes action, nor does the ultimately shallow script help his cause. More like Hitch-crock.

Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson pulled off something unique with Scream 2: They managed to craft a horror sequel that added to the original’s body count while also maintaining the tricky balance of self-referential humor and legit scares. While not the genre’s own The Godfather Part II, Ghostface’s second go-round still honored its lauded predecessor.

But once writer Ehren Kruger took over the script duties for Scream 3, the franchise’s jokiness went overboard. Other than the straight-faced and vicious opening scene with Liev Schreiber, Scream 3 doesn’t even try to scare; the kill sequences feel like unfunny comedy bits and transpire predictably (fake jump scare followed by virtually blood-less knife attack).

Shooting the attacks with the exact same pacing and camerawork as in the previous Scream flicks, Craven just seems bored throughout, as if only guided by mega-producer Bob Weinstein’s checkbook. Cue the Ghostface voice: “Who’s your favorite dead president?”

Deadly Blessing is Craven at his most uneven, and we mean that in both positive and negative ways. As a campy ’80s horror oddity, this supernatural pic—about an Amish-like religious sect known as the Hittites and their bizarre practices—is quite entertaining. You’ve got a young and exceptionally hot Sharon Stone tonguing down a giant spider, another pretty lady getting attacked by a snake in a bathtub, and unintentionally hilarious dialogue like, “You are a stench in the nostrils of God!”

Yet none of it congeals enough to form a legitimate narrative. Deadly Blessing wants to be a whodunit mystery, but Craven had too many bizarre ideas while making it and couldn’t restrain himself. In the end, a ridiculous plot twist involving a transvestite and a general lack of cohesion spoil the fun.

In 1989, Craven was five years removed from A Nightmare On Elm Street, yet he held a grudge against New Line Cinema for, in his mind, not paying him all of the Elm Street money he deserved. His solution: Blatantly try to create, and cash in on, another horror franchise, one with a Freddy-Krueger-like villain, dream sequences, and elaborate death scenes a la Elm Street. And, for the hell of it, a splash of social commentary aimed at television enthusiasts.

Screenwriting panache, however, fell by the wayside. Mitch Pileggi (The X-Files) is memorable as the film’s orange-jumpsuit-wearing, resurrected killer. Too bad he’s wasted in an idiotic Elm Street ripoff that co-stars John Tesh (no joke) and defies intelligence with dialogue like, “I will eat this wimp’s will power for breakfast,” and, said after Pileggi eats a guy’s hands, “Finger-lickin’ good.” Makes Fred Krueger sound like Dave Chappelle.

Let’s overlook Vampire In Brooklyn’s shamefully lazy title. And the fact that it’s historically Eddie Murphy’s first all-out serving of excrement, prefacing future cinematic punchlines like The Adventures Of Pluto Nash and Norbit. And that it’s by far Wes Craven’s least scary movie.

The main reason why this wannabe Blacula fails so miserably is its ineptly handled racial satire. It should come as no surprise that Craven is no Spike Lee; however, he’s not even Spike’s cousin who directed Undercover Brother. In one scene, Murphy’s bloodsucker, Maximillian, tries to fang-bang an older white lady, who tells him, “I understand the Negro people.” Should we laugh, or rub our chins in deep thought? How about flipping the bird towards the DVD case.

Prior to 1999, Craven had depicted gang rape, a mother being murdered in front of her baby by an inbred mongoloid, and Johnny Depp’s body getting sucked into a bed and spit back out as a blood geyser—pretty frightening stuff. That’s all child’s play compared to the director’s scariest contribution to cinema, however: “Music Of My Heart,” the N’Sync/Gloria Estefan theme song to his unexpected non-horror flick Music Of The Heart.

But here’s the worst part of all: That Total Request Live sure-shot was the film’s only original idea. Music Of The Heart is painfully conventional, stripping Craven of any directorial flair and relying on star Meryl Streep’s performance to punch up the rudimentary script. Streep plays an uptight (white) lady who starts up a music program in East Harlem to dissuade kids from illegal activities. So it’s a melodic Dangerous Minds, but with Lance Bass in Coolio’s place. Oh, the horror!

Music Of The Heart could’ve been worse, though; initially, Madonna, not Academy Award regular Streep, was set to star, but she dropped out due to “creative differences” with Craven. She might’ve watched Vampire In Brooklyn and thought, “Hey, wait a minute!”

In theory, My Soul To Take should’ve been Craven’s mighty comeback blow, a wild mash-up of Scream's witty teen characters and the hallucinogenic shocks of A Nightmare On Elm Street. After a five-year hiatus following Scream 3, he certainly had plenty of time to work his original script into something of that caliber.

So what’d he come up with? A nonsensical slasher disaster about a serial killer’s spirit possessing a high school kid. Unfortunately, the evil spirit doesn’t hack all of the annoying youngsters up before two of them confusingly try to explain the movie for a good 10 minutes during the final act.

Released theatrically in non-existent 3D, My Soul To Take jerked audiences out of their extra cash with a blind dude reaching for a rope, a giant vulture that’s supposed to be a metaphor for mental instability, and a killer who looks like a homeless pro wrestler. On DVD, in less than three dimensions, it’s no less terrible. We’re all for new “directed by Wes Craven” flicks, but somebody please keep the guy away from word processors.

Coming off of 1984’s hugely successful A Nightmare On Elm Street, Craven could’ve used his sudden hit-making clout to do just about anything in the horror genre. Apparently hoping to shit all over his good name, he took the low road and shot an unnecessary follow-up to his 1977 cult favorite The Hills Have Eyes, a sequel that few people wanted and even fewer folks paid to see.

Had more ticket-buyers filed into theaters to see The Hills Have Eyes 2, they’d have laughed in disbelief at Craven’s utter scarcity of imagination. Looking to write less and rehash more, he clutters the flick with flashback sequences comprised of footage from the ’77 original, most notably one for the surviving German Shepherd, Beast.

Yup, there’s a dog flashback, complete with the wavy editing transition later used in Wayne’s World's multiple ending sequence. We’ve heard of “screwing the pooch” before, but that’s just absurd.

Cursed premiered to deaf ears and closed eyes in February 2005 after a year’s worth of production delays, script rewrites, and cast alterations. Both Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson (he of Scream infamy) let it be known publicly that the final cut wasn’t their initial vision, a necessary disclaimer for a werewolf movie that’ll go down in horror history as one of the worst lycanthrope flicks ever. And that is said acknowledging the existence of Howling II: Your Sister Is A Werewolf.

Where do we begin? The special effects are barely Atari-level, resulting in a lead wolf villain that’s neither believable or scary. The humor hinges upon bad puns, gay jokes, and an inexplicable cameo from Scott Baio. And the attacks never once shock, thanks to widely reported PG-13 revisions demanded by producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein before the film’s release.

We’re pretty sure Wes Craven himself loathes Cursed even more than we do, though we’re down to challenge the depths of his hatred any time.

Some bad movies are worth a look simply for the inadvertent laughs; Deadly Friend is so rotten that only forty seconds of Craven’s silly debacle work on that level.

In perhaps the greatest cinematic use of a basketball, the movie’s villain, dead girl turned homicidal robot Samantha (Kristy Swanson), throws an orange roundball at Anne Ramsey, a.k.a. Mama Fratelli from The Goonies, causing her head to explode like a watermelon struck by a sledgehammer. Then, her body walks around the room like a drunken bar-rat trying to find an exit.

Delete the basketball-to-the-face scene from Deadly Friend and you’d be left with a horrifically acted, overly complicated, and altogether lifeless hybrid of horror and sci-fi.