Wishmaster

The horror genre is a funny one, a horror comedy perhaps? It goes in cycles, from the monster features of yesteryear, to the Hammer horrors of the 50's and 60's and onto slasher films. Once they had waned a big move towards knowing winks back at horror classics with the Scream tongue in cheek style.

Wishmaster very much falls into that category and it's directed by one of the all time great horror auteur's, Wes Craven. We open this film seeing a Persian prince watching his people get tortured by a shady character in a cloak. A priest stops him, and casts a spell that traps him in a gemstone. Hundreds of years later we cut to America and an accident involving a statue falling on a man. The statue breaks open, revealing the stone which is half inched by a dock worker. it passes onto Alex, a gemologist who accidentally awakens the evil cloaked figure who is revealed to be a genie, or Djinn. This genie is not the one of fairy tales, this genie is evil as he uses wishes to steal peoples souls and to usurp this world for his own. The film then becomes race against time for Alex to stop the Djinn and his evil plot.

This film is notable for several reasons. Firstly it has a host of horror icons in it as supporting actors. We see Robert Englund, Todd Farmer and Kane Hodder who form a holy trinity of 80's horror stars. It also features superb special effects, with things like skeletons ripping out from their owners bodies, and statues coming to life. There's also a rich vein of humour running throughout this movie, and at first you find yourself uncomfortable with laughing at a guard being trapped in glass and then shattering but pretty soon you just go with it and enjoy the ride. That's where this film excels in my opinion. It does chill, and there scares but it doesn't take itself too seriously and there's a real sense of fun here.

Andrew Divoff who plays the Djinn oozes menace from every pore and does a fine line on leering and glowering. The oneliners he delivers are done so with glee and the rest of the characters here also have snappily written lines to deliver which they do well. Wishamster is quite unlike the modern run of horror films with their taste for toture porn and realistic gore. Those films seems to think they have some self important message for the world. Wishmaster has none of that, instead it's a bloody good and enjoyable horror.