Director: Robert Kurtzman (1997)
Starring: Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Robert Englund
Robin Williams on a bad day, methinks. After an alkie crane-worker drops a very ancient and very dangerous artefact (on Ted Raimi's head, no less), the evil Djinn is awakened; a genie, but not as we know it. Put the big blue Aladdin bastich outta your head, this genie of the piece looks like a Buffy reject and gets his kicks in turning people's badly-worded wishes against them.
For some reason I kinda missed, the Djinn needs to own the soul of Alexandra (Lauren) before he and his fellow Djinn can inherit the Earth. In order to do this, he needs for her to ask of him three wishes. This involves him cutting a swathe through pretty much every horror icon of modern horror cinema. I only recently saw Wishmaster for the first time, and was pleasantly surprised by the amount of cameos in this movie. Although seeing the likes of Robert Englund, Kane Hodder and Tony Todd play cannon fodder is jarring to say the least, it sure is fun spotting them as they show up. Never will get that image of Robert Englund whimpering like a big girl's blouse outta my head though. And Kane Hodder's beard is hella odd.
Wishmaster is a blast, proving that not all 90s' horror is complete bull-doo-doo. Andrew Divoff makes for a great villain, and the multitude of gore scenes are done with humour, panache and a great big side-helping of sadism. Producer Wes Craven's involvement is quite evident throughout, although Kurtzman's direction is fun and snappy. Wishmaster is everything (WAIT FOR IT) one could wish for from a horror movie (GET IT. WISHMASTER... WISH FOR... AAAND HOLD FOR APPLAUSE)
Yeah, the bit you missed was Alexandra rubbing the ruby thing and blowing on it before looking at it under a microscope. I suppose Tammy Lauren rubbing or blowing on anything would certainly make something big appear though.
ReplyDeleteHaha, nice. Thanks.
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