Wishmaster (1997)
Plot: Alex Amberson, who works in an auction house, receives a gemstone for evaluation and accidentally awakens a Djinn who is trapped inside. The Djinn later escapes but now he must find the one who awakened him and force her to make three wishes so the other Djinn may be released too.
My Review: I originally saw this back in the late 90s. Probably when it first came out to video stores as I worked in one and I found myself hanging out in the Horror section often. Going into it now over a decade later I couldn’t remember much about the movie or the series.
The movie starts off in some ancient time. All hell is breaking loose as a Djinn is getting someone to make some wishes and everyone is dying at some sort of party. Obviously at this point in time the viewer doesn’t know too much.
But we see the Djinn get contained inside a big red jewel. In the present day, a statue gets dropped and breaks into many pieces. Inside of the statue is the gem the Djinn is trapped in. It ends up in the hands of a pawn shop owner who brings it to a auction house. There they have Alex take a look at it. During this time she somehow awakens the Djinn inside. And some sort of weird connection between the two is created.
Alex discovers some sort of imperfection inside of it (unknown to her it’s the Djinn) and to get a clearer picture of it brings it to her friend’s lab so he can take a closer look. At the lab there is a freak accident and the Djinn breaks loose. He starts prowling the streets looking for desperate people to grant wishes to so he can “charge up“ his jewel. Then he must find Alex, the one who awakened him. He needs her to grant three wishes so the rest of the Djinn can be released on Earth. In one scene he attempts to trick her into making wishes as the person doing the wishing doesn’t need to say “I wish” apparently.
So the Djinn goes around granting some people wishes here and there. But as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. Since the Djinn can’t use his powers outside of wishes, he uses wishes as a means to hurt people. For example, one women wishes for eternal beauty and he turns her into a “living” mannequin.
Because the Djinn needs Alex to release him they have some sort of psychic connection. Anytime the Djinn “attacks” someone, or rather, grants a wish, Alex has some sort of fainting, screaming fit. Its rather lame in my eyes. Had that not been there for filler. I think I would have enjoyed the movie more.
I also have got to mention that Tony Todd, Kane Hodder, and Robert Englund all have roles in this. Robert has a little more of a role in the film, but still it was cool to see them all in the same movie together so long ago. I totally forgot that they were all in this together until I saw their names in the opening credits.
The concept to the movie was decent and kind of neat. I’m not a huge fan of demons and things like that..which is kinda what this Djinn is. Its just unfortunate that I wasn’t more entertained by it.
I seem to recall really only enjoying one out of the four in the series. So I’ll have to give the others a try.
Gore/FX: Some of the gore was very decent. You have your really cheesy effects done back in the 80s/90s that so many low budget movies had then and now we have so much CGI. There seems to only have been a small window of time where people actual used real GOOD makeup effects and thankfully this movie had them. There was one shot early in the beginning, first 5 minutes of the movie actually, where a skeleton bursts out of a person. That was pretty cool.
Sexual Content: No nudity or sex or anything of the sort.
Acting: The acting was normal for a horror movie from back in the 80s, but as you can see this came out in 1997. So I felt it was lacking a little. It wasn’t terrible, and I could get through it with no problem. But it wasn’t the greatest.
Overall: While the movie didn’t suck. I doubt I’d watch this one again. I wasn’t overly entertained. There was a lot more they could have done with the wishes so I’m hoping they worked on that for the sequels.
My Rating:
