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Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies, 1999
Morgana (Holly Fields) helps her boyfriend burgle an art museum, something that ends with them murdering two security guards and freeing ancient Djinn Demerest (Andrew Divoff). Trying to fulfill a prophecy that would see him take over the world, Demerest sets about claiming souls when they make wishes from him. Morgana, who has become linked to Demerest and an integral part of the prophecy, seeks help from former flame Eric (Chris Weber) who is now a priest.
Constantly at war with itself over just how stupid it wants to be, pretty much every element here doesn’t work.
It’s hard to even really say anything about this movie, which is bad but in that barely-watchable way that also manages to be inoffensive and forgettable. A fundamental problem is that the movie totally refuses to choose a tone or point of view for its main character, or even consistently apply its own rules about the Djinn’s powers.
There’s nothing wrong with the film’s basic premise: a genie whose every granted wish backfires on the wisher in comically gruesome ways. Two of the movie’s kills actually show the absurd fun to be had with such a concept. A prisoner wishes that he could “walk through the prison bars” to freedom. A mob boss says of his enemy, “I want his head!”. And were the movie just a laundry list of such sequences, I think it would be campy fun.
Unfortunately, the majority of the kills/chaos don’t make sense. A man wishes he had never been born, and so he . . . ages backwards? How is that “not being born”? And also, this wish should theoretically means he never lived, and yet other characters in the film continue to talk about him and their relationship to him as an adult. Other times, the dialogue is written in such a vague way that the bad consequences don’t actually feel like a clever extensions of the wishes.
It’s hard for me to fault Divoff’s performance too much, because I think he’s really hamstrung by the terrible and all-over-the-place script he’s given. Demerest ranges from a cringe-worthy quip machine who does things like freezing people and then saying “Chill out” to a formally-speaking old-soul evil type. The script can’t decide which one he is, and so the character ends up being wildly inconsistent, even from one scene to the next.
It’s also really hard to root for Morgana, who we meet as she helps to murder two innocent men. To be fair (I guess), Morgana does regret murdering a husband and father of two, but are we really supposed to believe that she took a loaded gun to a robbery and didn’t anticipate that she could end up seriously hurting someone? Her character’s main job is to toss and turn in bed as she has visions of Demerest getting closer to creating hell on Earth. She also does things like: Googling Persian mythology, saying “stop it, stop it” when people try to make wishes, and making minimal effort to become the “pure soul” she’ll need to be in order to put an end to Demerest’s plan.
There’s an actual potentially good subplot in the form of Eric’s character, though it’s entirely underutilized. As a Christian, Eric approaches his interactions with Demerest from the context of that mythology. There is some humor to the way that Demerest must constantly correct Eric: no, he’s not the Devil; no, he’s not in a war with God; no, he’s entirely unmoved by being shown the cross. Eric’s inability to grasp this is pretty funny, and is one of the only intentionally funny aspects of the movie that works.
Easy-to-watch, but fails to make the most of its campy premise.
Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies, 1999
Morgana (Holly Fields) helps her boyfriend burgle an art museum, something that ends with them murdering two security guards and freeing ancient Djinn Demerest (Andrew Divoff). Trying to fulfill a prophecy that would see him take over the world, Demerest sets about claiming souls when they make wishes from him. Morgana, who has become linked to Demerest and an integral part of the prophecy, seeks help from former flame Eric (Chris Weber) who is now a priest.
Constantly at war with itself over just how stupid it wants to be, pretty much every element here doesn’t work.
It’s hard to even really say anything about this movie, which is bad but in that barely-watchable way that also manages to be inoffensive and forgettable. A fundamental problem is that the movie totally refuses to choose a tone or point of view for its main character, or even consistently apply its own rules about the Djinn’s powers.
There’s nothing wrong with the film’s basic premise: a genie whose every granted wish backfires on the wisher in comically gruesome ways. Two of the movie’s kills actually show the absurd fun to be had with such a concept. A prisoner wishes that he could “walk through the prison bars” to freedom. A mob boss says of his enemy, “I want his head!”. And were the movie just a laundry list of such sequences, I think it would be campy fun.
Unfortunately, the majority of the kills/chaos don’t make sense. A man wishes he had never been born, and so he . . . ages backwards? How is that “not being born”? And also, this wish should theoretically means he never lived, and yet other characters in the film continue to talk about him and their relationship to him as an adult. Other times, the dialogue is written in such a vague way that the bad consequences don’t actually feel like a clever extensions of the wishes.
It’s hard for me to fault Divoff’s performance too much, because I think he’s really hamstrung by the terrible and all-over-the-place script he’s given. Demerest ranges from a cringe-worthy quip machine who does things like freezing people and then saying “Chill out” to a formally-speaking old-soul evil type. The script can’t decide which one he is, and so the character ends up being wildly inconsistent, even from one scene to the next.
It’s also really hard to root for Morgana, who we meet as she helps to murder two innocent men. To be fair (I guess), Morgana does regret murdering a husband and father of two, but are we really supposed to believe that she took a loaded gun to a robbery and didn’t anticipate that she could end up seriously hurting someone? Her character’s main job is to toss and turn in bed as she has visions of Demerest getting closer to creating hell on Earth. She also does things like: Googling Persian mythology, saying “stop it, stop it” when people try to make wishes, and making minimal effort to become the “pure soul” she’ll need to be in order to put an end to Demerest’s plan.
There’s an actual potentially good subplot in the form of Eric’s character, though it’s entirely underutilized. As a Christian, Eric approaches his interactions with Demerest from the context of that mythology. There is some humor to the way that Demerest must constantly correct Eric: no, he’s not the Devil; no, he’s not in a war with God; no, he’s entirely unmoved by being shown the cross. Eric’s inability to grasp this is pretty funny, and is one of the only intentionally funny aspects of the movie that works.
Easy-to-watch, but fails to make the most of its campy premise.