Franchise Review: Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled (2003)

 

Here we are at the end of the Wishmaster series. It began with a movie that was pretty good but not great, went into a slight decline with the second one, got uber-boring with the third one, and now here we are with the fourth one, which completely and utterly ruins the whole series with its stupidity.

Lisa and her boyfriend Sam are at first a happy couple moving into their first house, until a motorcycle accident leaves Sam in a wheelchair. With their relationship strained, Lisa grows closer to the lawyer in their case, Steven, who ends up giving her a gift that holds the Stone of Secret Fire. Lisa has awakened the Djinn (again - why is it always a woman?) without knowing it, and he takes on the identity of Steven to coax the three wishes out of her.

The biggest reaction I have to Wishmaster 4 is WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING? Once again, they've taken a series with a pretty cool villain and completely squandered all of its potential to be gory good fun. I don't even really know what to say about this bomb that was so lazy with its writing that it couldn't even get the opening text about the Djinn correct. Just watch the first movie - you know, the way, way, way better one? - and copy it! Not that hard. But that doesn't even hold a candle to the overall point of Wishmaster 4, which is the Djinn... discovering human love. Kill me now.

I was worried at the beginning of the movie when there was boobs and a somewhat graphic sex scene only three minutes in, but this is not that kind of movie. You soon realize that you almost want it to be that kind of movie when finally, after three movies, the third wish is made and the Djinn actually doesn't grant it in order to fulfill the prophecy, as the movie's subtitle falsely promises the audience. Lisa wishes that she could love him - that is Steven - for who he really is, and that confuses the Djinn because of some crap about how human love has to be given freely. So then the movie becomes about the Djinn trying to make Lisa fall in love with him. That is one place that I never thought this story would go. I never wanted this story to go there. I never thought the writers would be so stupid as to make a movie about a wish-granting genie demon falling in love with a human. So stupid. So very, very stupid.

The acting is surprisingly good from the three mains of Lisa, Sam, and Steven. The only one I recognized was Michael Trucco as Steven because of a guest role he had on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit as a rapist - so I was already in the mind to see his character as a villain. Lisa is a nice, strong female character who is tough but still able to love Sam. She does contribute to her own relationship problems by spending so much time with Steven, but I can't really blame her based on how douchey Sam is to her pretty much every second of the day. Gosh, it sounds so tedious talking about relationship, lovey-dovey stuff in a fucking Wishmaster movie. This is horrible!

An added element to the Wishmaster story is the Hunter, who comes to earth to kill Lisa the waker before the third wish can be granted. So he's sort of a good guy because he has the power to stop the Djinns from taking over the world, but he's also a bad guy because he wants to kill Lisa (and because he kills that poor woman at Lisa's work - how rude). They hired what looks like a Calvin Klein model to play the Hunter because he has pretty hair and looks sexy with a sword. He and the Djinn have a pretty hilariously bad fight scene in the woods where many ludicrous lines of dialogue are thrown at each other in between bitchy throws and punches. The Hunter is killed in this fight, so his whole appearance in the movie was completely useless, except as a time-filler.

The Djinn is again played by John Novak, so again, he sucks. He still has the stupid voice and still has the pigtails, and they made his look even worse this time by giving him a red skirt to wear. The "wishes" he grants? Lame. There is only one semi-good gory scene: when he makes the lawyer mutilate himself by pulling out his tongue and cutting off his nose. The effects of the other Djinns arriving in a fiery background is so cheap looking that it is laughable. A low budget does not help a Wishmaster movie at all.

At the end of Wishmaster 4, I could not turn my TV off fast enough. This is a truly pointless sequel that does nothing to help a series that was already pretty well in the shitter. I gave the series a very fair chance, and all it did was let me down a little bit more with each installment. With this final film, I am beyond disappointed and almost a little angry at how bad they fucked all this up. So long, Wishmaster, I don't think I'll be seeing any of you again any time soon.