

Opening Logo courtesy of Benjamin J. Colón (Soul Exodus)

Do you guys remember Wishmaster?

I do. It just came out when I was starting to get into horror, and it was one of those movies that had a lot of play on premium channels. I remember a friend of mine had HBO and described Wishmaster 2 to me and I had to wrap my head around the idea of a man literally screwing himself to death. The sheer mechanics of it were mind-boggling, to steal a joke from a better writer.

I originally planned on reviewing the entire in a franchise breakdown, but I realized that it would mostly involve me ranting about how awful the sequels were. Like, headscratchingly terrible. It’s not as if the first Wishmaster is a horror classic, but it’s a fun horror movie with a great concept that could have been mined for a better franchise than it had. There was just so much stupidity in it that it’s hard for anyone to enjoy it, even ironically like we sometimes do with bad movies. I’m just warning you, because it’s going to happen.

The monster in Wishmaster is called a Djinn, which is another word for evil genie. It’s an ancinet evil that was stored inside of a small red gem. As the story goes, the Djinn are forced to live in the void between worlds. If you wake one up, he gives you three wishes. The catch is that if he grants all three wishes, the Djinn are free from that void and able to take control of the Earth. The other catch is that the Djinn is a jerk and will wildly misinterpret your wish on purpose in order to kill you. For example, if I wished that my headache would go away, he’d cause my head to fall off. Sure, I’d be dead, but my headache is gone. Like I said, he’s an evil creature. There are rare occasions when he does give you what you want, but claims your soul later to increase his power.

If you’re ranking the Djinn with the other movie monsters out there, he’s pretty low on the list. It’s probably because his franchise was mostly straight to video, gaining most of its popularity through cable. I wasn’t even aware the first film went to theaters until I did research for this article. There were no advertisements for this thing and I only learned about the films when the second film made its cable debut, as I mentioned above.

However it’s a very cool concept, one that could easily be used for a new franchise if Hollywood wanted to make a horror film that didn’t involve a vague ghost haunting dumb people for eighty minutes.

The first film, obviously, was 1997’s Wishmaster. It’s never going to be ranked among the truly great horror films but I’ve always had a lot of fun with it. The pedigree of horror alumni in the cast speaks for itself. Legendary special effects guru Robert Kurtzman steps behind the camera to direct, one of only five times he’s done that. It makes sense, because like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wishmaster is a very effects-driven horror film.

You can see the modest $5 million budget at work in the film’s opening, a scene from the past in which the Djinn is told to “show me wonders”. Sure, he’ll do that. He’ll imprison a guy in a wall, cause a man’s skeleton to burst from his skin, come to life (via stop-motion animation) and go after other people. That’s just in the first five minutes, and there is another heavy special effects massacre at the end of the film. It’s kind of amazing this only cost five million, in retrospect.

The horror alumni doesn’t stop with Kurtzman, however. We have an opening narrated by Angus Scrimm as well as guest appearances from Robert Englund, Kane Hodder, Tony Todd, Ted Raimi, Reggie Bannister and even Joe Pilato, who sadly doesn’t tell the Djinn to “choke on ’em.” There’s also references to Pazuzu and the Cthulhu Mythos. Needless to say, horror fans made this movie and knew exactly who they were making it for.

The plot is pretty simple. A woman wakes up a Djinn, it kills a bunch of people trying to get to her and force her to make three simple wishes. The best reason to see the movie, outside of the tremendous special effects, is Andrew Divoff as the Djinn/Nathaniel Demerest. He’s fun to watch every single moment he’s on screen. It doesn’t matter if he’s in human form or covered in the Djinn costume, he makes the most of his time on screen.

Wishmaster is a very fun horror movie that I think still holds up. It was still during a time when Hollywood took chances on horror films (it paid off too, as it tripled its budget). If you happen to have Hulu Plus and haven’t seen this, give it a look.

As with anything in the world of movies, it was successful for there must be a sequel! In this case, there were three sequels and they all went direct to video. Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies arrived in March of 1999 on cable TV, with a video release coming later. You can tell it’s made for TV, because the budget was slashed in half. Divoff thankfully returns to play the Djinn, which is sadly the last time he would play the role. More on that later.

This has a nice bit of continuity with the first, in that the gem is once again in the statue after time was reversed and stopped him from being released. This time, the Djinn is freed after a robbery goes awry and a guard is killed. This becomes important later and is the source of guilt for Morgana (one of the robbers) throughout the film.

The sequel is more or less the same movie, just with a lower budget and a different ending. Instead of coming up with a clever deus ex machina wish, we get a contrived mystical process to seal the Djinn back in the gem. This movie is mostly notable for being the movie where a man wishes for his lawyer to screw himself and the Djinn makes it happen. I don’t remember a whole lot after that, but would you?

While it’s not a good movie, it still features memorable deaths (there’s another with a human being being shoved through prison bars, with gory results) and Divoff is as fun as ever, perhaps more so because he seems to have acquired a taste for scenery.

The series wouldn’t stay gone long, as two movies were filmed in 2000 that were released in 2001 and respectively. The first one is Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell. Andrew Divoff is no longer on board, replaced by Jason Connery in human form and John Novak in Djinn form. AJ Cook, pre-Criminal Minds, is the female lead.

The last two sequels mostly blend together in my head as one big mess of awful. The fact that they were shot back to back on an even smaller budget (at least it looks that way) is probably why. The movies look awful, the special effects aren’t as good and even the Djinn costume seems more rubbery than normal. It doesn’t help that he spends quite a lot of time in fully lit areas, whereas Divoff’s version was usually shrouded or in the shadows. There’s a reason we don’t put our monsters in the daylight. It exposes them.

This is the movie where the Djinn fights the archangel Michael, because he’s wished into the world to fight the Djinn. It should be noted that Michael never gets one over on the Djinn and completely fails to protect anyone. This movie also features a swordfight between the two. It’s as silly as you can imagine.

The series goes out with a gasp in Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled. It is, without a doubt, one of the worst sequels I’ve ever seen. The whole hook of the movie, as revealed in the trailer, is that this is the one where someone finally makes three wishes and sets the Djinn race free.

The Djinn’s human form is seducing a woman to make her give him wishes. When she wishes she could love him for who he is, he has to figure out what that means. He wants to know what love is and he wants her to show him. So before he can grant the third wish, the Djinn falls in love with a human woman and this love is apparently so powerful that he refuses to allow his fellow Djinn to come forward and take over. This, by the way, results in the Djinn constantly begging for him to grant the wish already. You and me both, guys.

Another angel also shows up and is soundly defeated. The wishes got a lot dumber in the sequels, as people wished for pimples on strippers’ butts, “killer sex”, things like that. They aren’t even clever anymore. The worst problem is that the movies aren’t even bad enough to be entertaining. They’re just not fun at all and hard to watch. The movie ends with the Djinn dying, along with the franchise.

And that was the Wishmaster series. It had a lot of potential, but since it didn’t become a huge hit like the Freddys and Jasons out there, it quickly fizzled out. It’s a lot like the Candyman series in that respect, as no one’s really done anything with that in over a decade either. There haven’t even been whispers of a remake or reboot, so this series is straight-up dead. It doesn’t even have the name value for Lionsgate to wring a bunch of sequels out of it, like Dimension does with, well, any of their horror properties.

I think I’d like to see Wishmaster remade. It’s a B-movie horror film that could be great in the right hands. Even if some aspiring independent horror director wants to do something new with it, let them. It’s a fun concept, a cool-looking character and something that could provide for some entertaining horror movies.

Or you could just make another stupid Ouija movie. I guess that works too.

Ending Notes:

That’s it for me. Leave some comments here, on my Twitter or my Facebook.



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