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Ever heard of a film described as the “Expendables” of a certain genre? For example, if a horror movie manages to nab a whole bunch of familiar, iconic faces to pad out the cast for a single release, the movie is suddenly sold as “the Expendables of horror” in debt to Sylvester Stallone’s 2010 action star extravaganza. However, I’ve always found the description a little unfair, because those in the know are fully aware that the true Expendables of horror occured back in 1997, a full thirteen years before Stallone’s muscle-fest was even a thing – in fact, if anything, The Expendables should have been known as the Wishmaster of action…
Something of a cheesy, 90s ode to the kind of special effects horror smorgasbords you’d get at the end of the 80s, Wishmaster not only managed to rope together a vast collection of genre legends from both sides of the camera, but it went all out to try and create a bona fide horror icon from scratch. But did it succeed in its wild wishes? Actually pretty much, yeah.
Antique appraiser Alexandra Amberson finds that her workload gets something of a horrific boost after a freak accident at a dockyard causes a fire opal jewel to fall into her life. As she tries to analyse the ominous bling, she has now way of knowing the disturbing history of the artifact, or the malevolent evil that dwells within. You see, the opal is a prison to an ancient being known as the Djinn, who was locked inside after attempting to flood the world with evil back in 1127, and despite being the source of the stories about benevolent, wish-granting genies, you won’t find this bastard singing “You Ain’t Never Had A Friend Like Me” anytime soon.
The Djinn’s desires are simple. Once freed, it needs to charge its jewel with the soul of those it grants wishes to, but you can rest assured that any wish granted by the leering beast strictly follows “Monkey Paw Protocol” and will fatally blow up in your face. But once he’s charged up that jewel, the only way the Djinn can open up the void between worlds is to convince, coerce, or connive to get the one to freed them to make three wishes of their own and thus doom the world.
That’s the predicament Alexandra finds herself in when she inadvertently springs the monstrous magic wielder from his opal pokey – and while the creature finds himself a human face and proceeds on his mission to devise as many fucked-up, show-stopping, metal-as-fuck deaths for anyone dumb enough to get in his path, the young woman has to take a crash course in his lore in order to find a loophole to slow that roll. But when you consider that the Djinn sneakily treats almost any declaration of desire as an official wish, it won’t be long until he’s at full power. Can Alex manage to find the perfect solution to thwart his destructive plan? Pffft, she wishes.
Released during a time when horror was shifting into a more hipper, self-aware mode, Wishmaster was a shameless callback to cheesier times that riffed heavily on later Nightmare On Elm Street sequels which famously often stacked up numerous special effects sequences in order to fulfil a sizable order of creative killing. Where latter-stage Freddy Krueger was foregoing the fact he was wearing a glove with razor fingers in favour of eliminating teens by turning them into motorcycle hybrids, giant cockroaches and exploding their heads with mutant hearing aids, the people behind the Djinn seemed to want to single handedly bring surrealistic killing back, giving the villain a seemingly endless amount of ways to dispatch any sorry, son of a bitch that caught his notice. Obviously, it turns out to be the best part of the movie by far, which sees screenwriter Pete Atkins essentially rip off large swathes of his own script for Hellraiser III in order to deliver a treat in creative killing that no one has really managed to match since.
Director Robert Kurtzman (formerly the K in the KNB effects house) was obviously dedicated to bring back those days that he himself once worked in, where numerous FX companies would be employed to sling vast quantities of rubber and latex in order to outdo each other and provide the most impressive (and gruesome) show stopper imaginable. Thus, after a prologue that offers up a crazed preview of the kind of damage the Djinn can do (tree person, snake metamorphosis, escaping skeleton – you name it), we spend some time awakening this new threat and having him pick of random Los Angelians in order to restore his flagging mojo. It proves to be entertaining as hell, especially as the kills get wittier and more outlandish as we go. One minute, George Buck Flower’s slurring vagrant is wishing melty doom on a pharmacist played by Phantasm’s Reggie Bannister, then Jason actor Kane Hodder has been transformed into a pane of screaming glass thanks to the Djinn’s amusing habbit of twisting wishes against their owners. A vain woman is transformed into a mannequin, a cop who is determined to nail a perp gets what he asked for when they go on a jaw-ripping rampage, and so on.
None of it feels particularly cutting edge – especially in 1997, when horror was just turning meta – but while Wishmaster often feels like a direct to video release that accidently managed to find its way into cinemas, it’s throwback nature, and the fact that the entire experience is ludicrously jam packed with noticable names on both sides of the camera means that all the gore and carnage proves to be sweetly reassuring. Aside from all the actors I’ve already mentioned, we also get the voice of Angus Scrimm, appearances from the likes of Robert Englund, Ted Raimi and Tony Todd – and behind the scenes we have Wes Craven on producing duty and even long time Friday The 13th composer Harry Manfredini is on hand to provide the score.
However, props have to go to Andrew Divoff who, after years of supporting villain roles, finally gets to take centre stage and milk the living shit out of a mixture of Pinhead-style musings and Freddy-brand wisecracks. Does Divoff over-egg the pudding somewhat? Absolutely, and at times his delivery sounds dangerously close to a demonically possessed Triple H – but isn’t that what you’d want from a villainous genie with head tentacles and a penchant for ruining high class parties? Wishmaster was never going to move the horror genre anywhere new, but it’s desire to harken back to more awesome, grungy times during a period when horror was getting more respectable means that it probably didn’t get the respect it deserved. Acres of practical effects, horror legends oozing out of every orifice and a brand new attempt at a villainous icon? I probably didn’t realise it at the time, but Wishmaster includes everything a horror geek could hope for.
It’s cheesier than a triple sized quattro fromaggi pizza with extra cheddar on the side, but when it comes to old-school schlock, even a first viewing can have Wishmaster feeling like an old friend. While the Djinn might not have gotten the same longevity as some of his horror peers, he still delivers all the surreal gore and shameless pandering to horror history you could possibly wish for…
