Warning: the guy with the “ironic” deadly wish fulfilment tic has acquired a new set of rules. Once he’s fulfilled the third wish of the person who woke him, he’s opening up the gates to Earth for all other djinn to begin the djinnpocalypse. Otherwise, he still kills everyone uttering anything amounting to a wish in stupid and cheap ways.
The accidental awakener in this movie is Lisa (Tara Spencer-Nairn). Lisa’s life is a bit sad right now, for following a motorcycle accident caused by some construction defects in the bike, her artist husband Sam (Jason Thompson) is wheelchair bound, depressed and – this is quite clearly the worst part of it for the film and the guy – impotent. They are also involved in an apparently never ending law suit against the makers of the bike that killed the penis, with the help of Sam’s lawyer friend Steven (Michael Trucco). If friend is the word you use for a guy who wants to sleep with your girlfriend while she’s emotionally vulnerable and you are completely on the ropes.
The djinn soon murders Steven and takes on his form, all the better to get some wishes out of Lisa. Apparently, those count even if you don’t know you are making magical wishes or are just silently mumbling them into your glass of wine. Obviously, the lawsuit is soon wished to success, and Sam’s leg’s are working again, too. Not his penis, mind you, because the djinn’s still a literal kind of fellow. Lisa’s crucial last wish, whispered when the djinn continues Steven’s advances, about her wishing to be able to love him as he truly is (which makes no sense whatsoever in context of the scene, but hey), is going to be a bit of a problem, though, for a djinn may be perfectly allowed to murder or mutilate you, but apparently can’t just interfere in a person’s emotional life, and love needs to be given with actual consent instead of mind control. Which turns Lisa into the only person who could fulfil her own wish.
This does of course lead to various awkward and stupid ways in which the djinn tries to win over Lisa with Steven’s pseudo-Tom Cruise thing (see me shudder about the film’s true horror), get rid of the still incessantly whining Sam, and kill random people because this is a Wishmaster movie, dammit. Also involved is some male model type angel sent to hinder the fulfilment of the third wish by murdering Lisa, or random people who get in his way, and other djinn popping in from their realm to annoy Wishie and look like sub-Cenobites.
There’s is a core of a really interesting horror movie about love in the face of depression, the question of how important sex is to love, and a weird love triangle between man, woman and djinn hidden away in Wishmaster 4, but it’s buried under too much guff to ever come to the surface.
The script by John Benjamin Martin and Peter Atkins is simply incompetent. It’s not just unable to see what an interesting tale this could be when prepared properly but seems to be actively working to destroy any hint of it, writing characters as thin as cardboard and show thinking about sex and relationships many a softcore porn movie writer would have been embarrassed by. That they can’t write Sam or Lisa in any believable way as hurt human beings does not come as a surprise, but then, I’m not too sure Spencer-Nairn or Thompson would actually be able to play them as such. That’s neither here nor there anyway, for instead of finding the film’s narrative core and looking for ways to tell it to an audience, all the script ever seems to do is find some way to shoehorn another opportunity for the djinn to kill someone in, even if they need to invent a killer angel who has sod all to do with anything.
Which would be well and good, or perhaps at least mildly interesting, if those kills were any good, but there’s no imagination at all to the ways wishes and death connect, the special effects are dreary and embarrassing, and Chris Angel’s direction is the sort of thing that recommends itself by the ability to point the camera vaguely into the right direction.
Which, as far as achievements go, doesn’t manage to make Wishmaster 4 any more interesting.
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