In short: The Final Wish (2018)

Following the death of his father, luckless lawyer without career options and money Aaron (Michael Welch) returns to his home town to continue the fights he and his mother (Lin Shaye) never grew out of, pine after his former girlfriend Lisa (Melissa Bolona) – who is now together with his old nemesis, town sheriff, asshole and potential abuser Derek (Kaiwi Lyman). Well, actually, he’s just coming for the funeral, but that’s not really how things play out.

For strange things clearly connected to a sealed urn belonging to Aaron’s antiques dealer father start happening. Whenever Aaron makes a wish (and Aaron uses the phrase “I wish” with the absurd regularity of a character in a script with a certain lack of imagination) it becomes true; not in totally benign ways, mind you: when he wishes himself to be prettier, for example, he gets hit by a car and the resulting plastic surgery does indeed improve his looks. Or that’s what the film and everyone around him says, for in one of this thing’s better ideas, there’s barely any visible difference at all there.

Irregularly, the wishes do cost the lives of people as a price, but the film never sets this part of the wishing rules up terribly well, and really only seems to include them because a horror film needs to have corpses in it, or something. Obviously, Aaron has acquired a jinn, and just as obviously, things are not going to stay nice and profitable for him for long. Though, making things easier on a guy whose middle name apparently is “I wish”, this jinn doesn’t grant the traditional three wishes but seven.

Timothy Woodward Jr.’s The Final Wish is one of those examples of contemporary horror I wish I liked better than I actually do. It certainly looks pretty good (particularly for its budget bracket), and the director does add some neat little touches to some of the spookier scenes. I also enjoy how much the film starts out as your typical US indie movie about a luckless guy returning to his hometown; that is, for as long as it actually seems to put the proper effort into building the characters and their situation. Soon enough, we drop down into cliché horror movie character land where people turn into idiots whenever the script demands it, and where the character relations the film first sketched out well enough are never filled in properly, because it prefers spending its running time on co-writer Jeffrey Reddick chasing his one big success, Final Destination, with a couple of kill scenes that pointlessly and without any thematic reason play out like a cheaper and more subdued version of that franchise, bargain basement Lynchisms like a random clown appearance, Tony Todd popping in for a scene of pointless exposition, and other stuff that gets the film nowhere. And let’s not even mention the embarrassing look of the jinn once we get to see it.


There’s a good movie hiding under all the dross, one that talks about lives not going as well as those living them wished (see what I did there?) via an evil jinn that actually uses the yearning that comes with not living up to any of one’s dreams for evil, but the film we actually get is a deeply mediocre bit of cliché horror wasting talent and time on things I’ve seen done better a thousand times.

Three Films Make A Post: Nothing's more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose.

American Violence (2017): This thing, directed by Timothy Woodward Jr., is what they called a “stinker” in the olden times when I still had all my hair and teeth. It’s an overly ambitious movie that makes big gestures towards exploring the nature of violence and evil through a thriller lens but actually spends its running time regurgitating all serial killer thriller clichés you may or may not remember, presenting them through hilariously po-faced direction, tone-deaf dialogue of the “how not terribly clever people think intelligent people speak” type, and actors who just aren’t good enough to sell any of it. Seriously, when your best thespian is Denise Richards (adding a psychologist to her nuclear physicist etc roles), you have yourself a problem.

Patema Inverted aka Sakasama no Patema (2013): This anime directed and written by Yasuhiro Yoshiura, on the other hand, is really rather great. It concerns the adventures of (of course) two teenagers on a post-apocalyptic Earth where some people live with an inverted gravitational direction. That’s of course a pretty damn silly idea, but it drives the film to moments of true awe and wonder, and adds ingenious little twists to help a plot that at its core is as generic as they come feel as vibrant and alive as the animation itself.

There’s also a rather potent metaphorical level to a tale of two people coming from very different places with opposite gravitational pulls falling in love that should speak to romantics of all ages and places.

Cherish (2002): Finn Taylor’s comedy/thriller/whatever does remind me a bit of the films of Jonathan Demme when their genre descriptions were equally vague/all-encompassing. It’s not as good as Demme at his best – there’s a bit too much calculated twee-ness in here for that – but there are moments in here when the film truly sings with a mix of honest eccentricity, surprising ideas, and unpredictable tonal shifts that are indeed the actual tone of the film.


The whole high strangeness of the film is centred around a disarmingly charming main performance by Robin Tunney and an able supporting cast (among others Brad Hunt as an improbable love interest, and Ricardo Gil as our heroine’s gay, wheel-chair bound, little person neighbour who isn’t at all the caricature that description may suggest), whose performances organically shift and change with the film.