I remember seeing WISHMASTER in the theater in 1997. More than that I remember cleaning the theater, because I worked there. There weren’t many people going, so there wasn’t much to clean, but I would try to be around at the very end of the credits because I thought it was funny that you hear the Djinn saying “Careful what you weeessshhh for!” in his ludicrous evil voice. That was the main thing I remembered.

It definitely did not impress me back then, and I’m afraid this is not one of those SLEEPWALKERS situations where I just wasn’t ready. But I can at least say that WISHMASTER is pretty good for a laugh when it’s decades after the fact and you’re not hoping for anything genuinely good, let alone an exciting new horror creation from Wes Craven (who “presents” it).

I’m not sure what Craven contributed, if anything, but the director is Robert Kurtzman, who is usually not known as a director. He’s the K in KNB EFX who in his capacity as a makeup FX genius helped create versions of Freddy, the Predator, Leatherface, Darkman, Pumpkinhead and more. As a filmmaker his biggest feat was writing a 24-page vampire treatment and commissioning newcomer Quentin Tarantino to write a script based on it, then after not getting it off the ground letting him give it to Robert Rodriguez.

Not that I wouldn’t love to see Kurtzman’s FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, but he obviously couldn’t have done anything slick like Rodriguez did. He makes true b-movies like THE DEMOLITIONIST, starring Nicole Eggert from Charles in Charge as as a zombie cyborg cop. Even though this here genie movie got a wide theatrical release, it’s coming from the same realm.

The villain of WISHMASTER is a nameless Djinn played by Andrew Divoff (TOY SOLDIERS, EXTREME JUSTICE, AIR FORCE ONE). We’re told by one of the movie’s exposition-providing mythology experts to “Forget Barbara Eden. Forget Robin Williams. To the peoples of ancient Arabia, a Djinn was neither cute nor funny.” Instead they are “creatures condemned to dwell in the void between the worlds.”

No, my friends, this is not your father’s genie. There is no lamp. There is a jewel instead. A whole different ball park. The deal is if a person unleashes him by touching the jewel he will try to tempt them into wishing for things, because when he grants them three wishes “the unholy legions of the Djinn shall be freed upon the earth.” The wishes don’t even have to be formal, he’ll always count an offhand comment or casually agreeing to something. If the Djinn said “You want me to leave the TV on?” and you said “I guess” that would count as a wish. And meanwhile, this Djinn gains power by going around getting other people to make so-called wishes and finding ways to twist the words to be deadly. I’m not sure if that’s part of the Djinn culture or just this particular one being a prick.

There’s a prologue about some shenanigans he got up to in Persia, 1127 A.D. – one guy’s skeleton tore out of his body and started attacking people, it was great – but he’s been trapped in an opal since then. He comes to America via “a statue of the pre-Islamic god Ahura Mazda” being delivered by boat to collector Raymond Beaumont (Robert Englund). We can tell what kind of a party we’re in for by the comical way the crane operator (Joseph Pilato – Rhodes from DAY OF THE DEAD) openly pours himself a drink on the job, and then by the way Beaumont’s assistant (Ted Raimi) yells at him that he’s a dumbass and stands directly under the crate and doesn’t move when it drops on him like a piano on a Looney Tune. Beaumont turns his head and winces, but then mutters “Ten years” so you know he’s mad because he wasted so much time trying to get that statue, not because his employee is now flat.

The next sign is when a dock worker sees the huge opal in the broken pieces of the statue, very conspicuously looks around and snags it without anyone noticing. He pawns it and it ends up with Nick Merritt (Chris Lemmon, UNCOMMON VALOR) at Regal Auctioneers, who gives it to our protagonist, girls basketball coach, recreational tennis player and antique appraiser Alex (Tammy Lauren, RADIOLAND MURDERS). She passes it to her friend Josh (Tony Crane, The Big Easy tv series), he shoots a laser at it, a baby Djinn (Verne Troyer from the AUSTIN POWERS movies) plops out and mauls him so he’ll wish for an end to the pain. Wish granted.

It grows into the adult Djinn, who is able to walk the city by wearing a hoodie and only talking to drunks (George “Buck” Flower, BATES MOTEL), but soon he steals the body of Nathaniel Demerest (Divoff) so they don’t have to have him wearing the makeup all the time. Alex is officially on record as the one who woke the Djinn, so every time he pulls some shit she has a painful vision of it. She spends the movie slowly investigating and finding out there’s a Djinn and what not.

The trail brings her to Beaumont, who shows off his “room of lost gods, once worshiped, now forgotten” where he’d planned to put the statue. We’re getting ahead of ourselves but for the climax the Djinn will appear at a party at his house so Beaumont can cower in front of a forgotten god and also some of his statues can come to life. But mostly we just see the Djinn do a series of gimmicky kills like slicing a guy (Kurtzman himself) with piano wires while party guests run around screaming and/or catching on fire.

The glass half full way to look at this is that Divoff is having a great time being over-the-top evil, doing a Saturday morning cartoon villain voice, twisting his grin and eyebrows like a fuckin Grinch, looking hugely pleased with his wickedness at every moment. The glass half empty way of looking at it is that this is just a stupid fuckin character that cannot possibly be cool no matter how over the top the performance goes.

I guess I lean more toward glass half empty, but on this viewing I did get sort of a kick out of just how corny and dumb it is. A Cinefantastique article from the time said that it “began as an idea conceived by Live Entertainment to establish a new character—an evil genie who, like Freddy Kruger, could become the basis of a movie franchise.” The latex makeup, terrible one-liners and fanciful FX sequence kills obviously follow in the Freddy tradition, but frankly I think Freddy would be embarrassed to do most of this stuff. Making a lady wish to be eternally beautiful and then morphing her into a mannequin – that’s amateur hour.

I think there’s also a Clive Barker/HELLRAISER influence with mortals facing powerful deities and shit. It’s way more like HELLRAISER III: HELL ON EARTH than the good ones, but an attempt is made. In fact, it’s written by Pete Atkins, member of Barker and Doug Bradley’s avant garde theater troupe, writer of HELLRAISER II, III and IV, and guy who played “Rick the Barman” in part III (or as I call him, Kool Aid Man Cenobite).

Atkins is the only HELLRAISER connection, but they went pretty hard at trying to involve people from all the other big name horror franchises. I mentioned Englund in there, and it’s got A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET cinematographer Jacques Haitkin behind the camera. Representing FRIDAY THE 13TH, Kane Hodder has a scene as a security guard, and Harry Manfredini did the score. They got the late great Tony CANDYMAN Todd as another security guard, Tom Savini and Joe Pilato provide DAWN OF THE DEAD/DAY OF THE DEAD representation, and on behalf of PHANTASM Reggie Banister plays an angry pharmacist and Angus Scrimm is the narrator. Bruce Campbell must’ve been busy but we have Dan Hicks and Ted Raimi to rep EVIL DEAD 2. Oh, and Beaumont has a Pazuzu statue like the one in THE EXORCIST.

No Chucky though. No Leatherface. No Michael. We can do better. We must do better.

The real joy of the movie, as much as there is any, is watching the goofy ways he wish-kills people. He gets security guard Hodder to say “You’d have to go through me” so he can turn him into stained glass and literally do that. I should mention that this was in the era of “oh man, low budget computer effects are not ready to do that yet.”

Todd’s scene is also silly, but maybe more dignified, I don’t know. He plays a more high class security guard at Beaumont’s party, gets to wear a tux and an earpiece, says his name is Johnny Valentine. He prides himself on being a tough guy who won’t put up with any shit, but for some reason when the Wishmaster starts berating him about having an unfulfilling job and then asks, “Would you like to escape?” Johnny leans in and says, “Yeah.” So the Djinn puts him in a straitjacket in a water tank like Houdini. Which seems like a violation of Djinn rules because he didn’t wish to not be able to escape. You’re doing the opposite of his wish. Also it’s weird that no one notices the guy drowning in the tank at the entrance to the party.

The funniest death is earlier when he gets Alex’s boss Nick to wish for a million dollars and then it cuts to his mom signing up for life insurance before going on a flight.

A seriously funny little skit. Good shit. And then my favorite FX part is when Beaumont pukes up this slimy wiggly growing tentacle pod thing.

WISHMASTER was a cheesy movie then, much cheesier now. But when you consider that it had a budget of $5 million it’s pretty ambitious how much they do, so maybe I should forgive the scenes set inside the opal for looking like a Halloween maze in a high school gym. In the Cinefantastique article, Kurtzman claimed “we are doing five times the amount of work of the budget,” and that it was possible because it was his company KNB and “we’re pulling alot of favors in from optical houses that we’ve worked with before.”

Budgets of other 1997 theatrically-released horror films (according to Wikipedia):

ANACONDA – $45 million
EVENT HORIZON – $60 million
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER – $17 million
MIMIC – $30 million
NIGHTWATCH – $10 million
THE RELIC – $40-$60 million
SCREAM 2 – $24 million

I don’t know. I guess I had enough fun with this that it’s fair to say I have a mildly soft spot for WISHMASTER. But I wish it was better.

oh fuck I’m somehow ironically dead now aren’t I?