‘The Curve’: Matthew Lillard’s Forgotten Thriller Has A Surprising Rotten Tomato Rating
When you think of everyone’s favorite lanky-yet-endearing late-90s actor, Matthew Lillard, so many movies must come to mind. There’s the role of Stu in slasher horror revitalizer, Scream. Or the punk to end all punks in SLC Punk. Maybe you’re thinking of Cereal in Hackers or Shaggy in Scooby-Doo. All those great titles, yet there’s one thriller that everyone’s forgetting. The Curve, also known as Dead Man’s Curve, came out in 1998 and features all the twists and turns that normally spell an instant hit. So why has everyone forgotten?
It all starts with an urban legend.
The Curve is yet another urban legend movie. This time, the myth is all about the “dead man’s curve.” According to the legend, if your college roommate kills themselves, you get an automatic 4.0 for the semester. But what if your roommate isn’t suicidal? In this movie, they take matters into their own hands just to get a good grade.
Tim (Matthew Lillard) and Chris (Michael Vartan) develop an elaborate plan to kill their roommate to make it look like a suicide. Chris just wants to get into Harvard, and Tim? Well…he’s crazy. The plan seems to go off without a hitch, but Tim goes more and more off the rails, and Chris is starting to suspect something might be up. Maybe his girlfriend Emma (Keri Russell) can help?
Of course, Matthew Lillard plays the psycho well. That should come as no surprise to fans. He’s so thoroughly an unlikeable character that you’re going to seethe every time he’s on-screen. In fact, most of the characters are trash. But, at least to my teen mind when I first saw the movie, the twists and turns more than make up for the all-caps HORRIBLE characters.
Well, it turns out not everyone could forgive some of the movie’s flaws. The Curve has a rare Rotten Tomato rating that might explain why you’ve forgotten about this thriller.
Why the name change?
Is it The Curve or Dead Man’s Curve? And why does this storyline sound so familiar?
As luck would have it, another movie came out in 1998 with the exact same premise. Dead Man on Campus had college students planning the death of their roommate for a 4.0, but this one was a comedy rather than a thriller.
Although writer/director Dan Rosen originally released his movie as Dead Man’s Curve, he ended up truncating it to just The Curve to hopefully not seem so similar to the comedy coming out around the same time. Considering the comedy counterpart has a slightly higher Rotten Tomato rating, Rosen maybe needed to change more than the name. Speaking of which…
The critics have spoken.
Check out that rating. The Curve has a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 8 reviews. Clearly the critics weren’t fans of Matthew Lillard’s thriller. It turns out they had a lot to complain about.
Rare that you’ll see this many moronic plot twists in just one movie.
Scott Weinberg, eFilmCritic.com
A talented cast wasted beneath the muddled script.
Felix Vasquez Jr., Cinema Crazed
Ouch. But considering the audience score is above a 50%, maybe that means the critics are being a little too harsh? Judge for yourself. You can watch The Curve on Tubi.