The first Wishmaster film was a box office success which inevitably means it is sequel time. This movie opens with the Djinn trapped in his gemstone which itself has been re-interred in a statue. However some burglars awaken him during a botched robbery and the Djin does his best to make sure all hell sets loose.
This time, instead of granting 3 wishes to the original waker, an improbably sexy woman, the Djinn sets forth to garner 1001 souls. He does this by taking credit for the robbery, so that he can get sent to jail an therefore have easy pickings when it comes to desperate souls before he can go after the original waker. Once you get over that, this film follows the same formula as the first. That's not such a bad thing but you do wish the film-makers had used a little more imagination.
The effects are as good as in the first movie with a special glee given to an apocalyptic scene set in a casino. How can you not love a roulette wheel rampaging round and severing limbs? Or cards flying out of the deck so fast they behead someone? Whilst Andrew Divoff is again excellent as the Djinn, the rest of the cast ain't exactly up to much. Some of the lines are painful and there's not much of the fun of the first movie. Perhaps that's because we had already seen the first and knew what to expect. This still mixes the horror action with a sense of fun but this feels like a slightly anaemic version, a Diet Wishmaster if you will. The first film told a stnad alone story, and if perhaps there had been a wider theme to tie in then this film would have been better but thats all a bit moot now.
That doesn't make this a bad movie, you'll still get your jumps, you'll still get your enthusasically gory special effects and you'll get the laughs as well but, much likesleeping with a previous partner, it just wont be as good as it was before.
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