Chris Weber .... Eric
Wishmaster 2 is plagued by two of the common problems faced by horror sequels. First, the need for additional contrivances to make the story work. Contrivances used in the original to stretch the story out to full length usually can’t be used again, as you’d end up just remaking the first movie. You have to come up with something else, which is usually more far-fetched and leads to more plot holes. Second, and this is especially true with an evil character-based franchise, the villain gets more and more screen time, gets less and less scary, and more and more campy. There is another problem with Wishmaster 2, which I won't class as a common problem, is the endless use of the phrase "Fulfil the prophesy". Any screenwriter who uses the words "Fulfil the prophecy" more than five times in a script really needs to just take a job at Sears and forget about the movies.
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"I'm just a statue, don't expect too
much from me." |
The Wishmaster is an ancient evil called the Djinn. The Djinn can grant wishes, but if they grant three to the person who freed them they can take over the world. At the end of Wishmaster the Djinn ended up trapped in a gem prison which was stuck inside a statue. The first task of the sequel is to get him back out. Our heroine Morgana’s gang is robbing the museum where the statue is held. But they get disturbed by security guards. The have a gun fight and the statue is damaged. The gem falls out and Morgana grabs it. The gun fight continues and the gem gets smashed. Morgana escapes, but the Djinn appears, kills some people, then takes the form of Nathaniel Demerest again.
Now that he’s out we need a additional contrivances to have an actual 90 minute story. In the first Wishmaster the contrivance was that the Djinn had to actually track down the person who released him like a private eye. If they did that again then we’d have basically the same movie. So in Wishmaster 2 the Djinn now has to get 1001 souls before he can take over the world by granting three wishes to the person who freed him. He gets souls by trading them for wishes, so you can see that you’ll be able to pad out a lot of running time if he has to get that many.
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"I don't appreciate being summoned
to appear in such a crappy sequel." |
Because he needs so many Nathaniel confesses to the museum robbery and the shooting of a security guard. Despite the fact that the cops don’t believe he did it alone, he gets sent to prison and the investigation disappears from the film. Prison is a good place for the Djinn as there are a lot of wishes, so he starts granting them and collecting souls. With the villain conveniently locked up, Morgana starts working out how to defeat him.
She does this with the help of Father Gregory, a hunky young priest who she used to be in a relationship with. This is where a second contrivance comes in. They discover that now the person who imprisons the Djinn again has to be pure of heart. Morgana is a naughty girl, so she has to purify herself. She starts wearing white clothes and cuts a finger off. Her and Father Gregory spend lots of screen time being boring, and don’t manage to generate anything interesting about faith and the nature of evil from the whole set-up.
After about a million years the Djinn still only has about 200 souls, so he has to think of a better plan. At one point there seems to be a foreshadowing when we see a headline about the imminent eruption of Mount Etna. But they possibly couldn’t afford the effect of the Djinn stopping an eruption and answering the wishes of thousands, so nothing comes of it. Instead, he busts out of jail (with a fucking obnoxious Russian guy), and goes to Vegas where people are always wishing for things.
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"The Terror Of An Ill-Fitting Bra"
campaign was rejected by Bendon
executives. |
This is where things get really nutty. Firstly Nathaniel gets a job in a casino faster than the Rat Pack in Ocean’s 11. Not just that, from his office it looks like he may be running the casino. I assume this is so he can answer people’s wishes by rigging the games, but since he has magic powers it’s not necessary for him to have this job to do that. Morgana and Father Gregory show up. Gregory says of the doomed casino patrons "They all wanted something for nothing", and Morgana replies "And that’s just what they got". I thought they didn’t get anything, unless she means they got killed for free. Then we have confrontation, resolution, and an opening for another sequel.
Wishmaster 2 is pretty lame. I’m not giving it one star because Divoff is still pretty funny, even if he’s overused. But as with most crappy horror sequels, the number of useless and obnoxious characters has multiplied. And despite the repetiution of "Fulfil the prophecy" I'm not sure what the prochecy is, and where it came from. There are some amusing scenes, but they don’t stop the film as a whole being a nonsensical, patched-together, money-grubbing, piece of direct-to-video-crap.
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