Holidays (2016)

okay guys how did I miss all these anthology horror films that have slipped down the pipe

I mean it.  There have been like four films released in the past year, and I've just been blithely ignoring them like small chickens, begging to be scooped into my mouth as I bellow "YEAH ITHZ OKAY I GUETHS."  I have a deep love for anthology horror, since it allows a person to experience the central core horror without all that pesky trappings or characterization.  There's the setup for about three minutes, then it's monster monster time yee-haw.  So, what happened?  The embarrassing answer is that I've had less time for horror movies since I've been experiencing social interactions, the thing that probably kills serious horror discussion, since it is a damn difficult balancing act to have deep thoughts about slasher weaponry in a psychosexual connotion while looking someone in the eye and telling you how much you love them.  But I'm trying my best here, guys!

At any rate while browsing through a completely legitimate film site for something for my girlfriend and I to watch, I saw Holidays, which billed itself as a collection of short horror films, each one related to a various holiday.*  That's just corny enough to work, I said, trying to ignore that one of the directors was fucking Kevin Smith.  After all, the guys that did Starry Eyes, the film that should have been considered the best horror of 2014 instead of the fucking Babadook, had a story in it!  It can't be that bad, right?

And the truth is that it's not all bad, but holy shit the chaff to wheat ratio for this anthology is fucking grim.

The primary issue with the film is that there are a whole eight stories packed into a 105-minute running length.  Most of the stories feel truncated and slight as a result, which is more frustrating when the few good'uns ended pre-maturely, making me rage at the foolish producers for allowing the fool films to remain.  I kid, of course, as I'm mature enough to understand that balancing all these different directors and concepts into a cohesive settlement that made everyone happy is a feat unto itself, but still.  Eurgh.

So about the Starry Eyes guys, they get first dibs with Valentine's Day, which is basically a revenge murder story where a shy swimmer pines for her coach while being bullied by another girl.  Also the coach has to get a heart surgery and you see where this is going right.  The realistic eye towards social dynamics and swag camera shots from Starry Eyes  are there, but the level of setup required for a story like this with the allotted running time means the ultimate experience is like being shoved along very quickly by your parents through an interesting museum exhibit.

The second film, St. Patrick's Day, is similarly conflicting.  On one hand, the plotline, involving an Irish schoolteacher, her sinister charge, pagan rituals, and one aspect of St. Patrick's acts, is actually a fairly novel concept for how to make a horror short about this holiday (I expected something about fucking leprechauns or a monster with green blood ooooh fuck off).  On the other hand, the girlfriend and I agreed it was a fucking mess, with neither the horror or comedy elements coming off right, leaving a tepid, confusing mess with special effects that sabotaged any real creepiness.

Easter comes next, and it's basically a clever bit of creature work that no doubt spawned from someone snickering about the dictomy of the holiday existing around both Jesus and a magical rabbit.  It's creepy I guess, but really I barely remember it because it was too close to the orbit of the worst and best entries of the film.

The worst easily belongs to Mother's Day, which was a lazy mess in every sense of the word.  The plot barely relates to the actual holiday, being about some woman who gets pregnant super easily, who for some reason takes the advice of her doctor to visit a new-age fertility clinic in the desert that are (get ready) not quite on the up and up.  The unending barrage of pointless scenes filmed in "wow look at me" camera angles couldn't distract me from the fact that this plot has been done multiple times already, most notably with V/H/S2's Safe Haven.  The whole experience feels like a homework assignment done the night before, complete with the hilariously awful final sequence, which is the pregnant woman giving birth, except OH NO IT'S A BLOODY ARM COMING UP FROM THE DRESS the end d minus see me after class please.

you also might notice that the bloody hand is so evil that it's coming out of her left thigh, jesus christ

Washing off the stink slightly is Father's Day, the best of the bunch, a sentiment echoed by my significant other so it's OFFICIAL DEAL WITH IT.  It concerns a young woman receiving a tape cassette from her missing father, detailing to her how she can find him again.  It's an honestly really effective film for several reasons: the locations and shots evoke a steadily rising sense of dread, the plot is simple enough to peaceably co-exist within its time limit, and the fact that said father is voiced by Michael Gross, who depending on your cultural background, you probably know as the dad from Family Ties or the crazy survivalist guy from Tremors.  His voice through the tape's filter is a perfect mixture of fatherly love and "oh god no don't do that" creepiness.  The only real criticism is that the ending is maybe a bit too ambiguous, but with stories like this I tend to prefer creating mystery over the "you see the truck was Dracula all along" plot poop bubble burst that occasionally appears in films like this.

It says alot about the level of quality in Holidays that the film done by Kevin Fucking Smith is arguably the second best.  I mean, oh sure, Halloween basically has nothing really to do with Halloween, and yeah Kevin Smith's meathanded attempts at tacking girl power and online harassment still reeking of white duder viewpoints could be discussed ad nauseam, but it's filmed well, and there's some admittedly clever lines.  You win, Kevin.  Fuck.

Christmas wins the "biggest waste of potential reward," featuring Seth Green as a beleaguered husband stealing the holiday's primo toy, a VR machine that shows you what's inside your head or something, from the hands of a dying man.  Unsurprisingly, he begins to see things from the perspective of the dead guy, and I settled in, expecting a serviceable, maybe even clever, techno-rehash of the "guy gets X transplant from mystery donor, things go to shit."  But for some reason, perhaps due to the running length, the story goes in a totally different, absolutely absurd direction before just deciding to abruptly end.

New Year's Eve is about a serial killer who finds a vulnerable date for the big ball drop and if you aren't able to figure out the twist already you haven't seen enough horror films.  This one exists, and it does not offend me, but I cannot sense its being either.

So, Holidays.  I could barely partake in it as a giant anthology horror nerdlord, and my slightly less irradiated girlfriend thought it was ass.  Ultimately it's something to watch, but I wouldn't mark it on your calanGORE eheheheheheeeeeahhhhh.

*: a weird coincidence is that two of the other anthology horror films last year were also holiday related, though focusing on a single holiday instead of the golden HORRORAL experience, make of that what you will

Overthinking Terrible: Mothman (2010)

There's a rule in horror filmmaking that your creations should follow their self-made rules.  I'm not talking about the shit like "the last girl" or "the bad guy always gets up one last time" shit that we've seen interminably mocked in shit like Scream and Cabin in the Woods.  I'm referring to the notion that, when you've created something out of the ordinary, it's still bound by the rules set out for it.  This is the shit that has been around since mythology began, from the Hydra's regenerative capacity removed by fire to its necks, to vampire's lethal aversion to light, to Chester Cheetah being unable to remain in a state of uncoolness for over 4 seconds.  It is what allows us to retain an aura of believability and safety to monsters and demons.  Even if they're capable of feats that can awaken our greatest fears, they're still bound to some sort of physical or spiritual law.

I say this to preface the fact that I have never seen a movie with less respect and/or understanding of this requirement than Mothman, a Syfy Original not to be mistaken with the Mothman Prophesies, which was a ghost conspiracy theory with Richard Gere.  Instead of Gere, our primary star draw is Jewel Staite, who apparently was on Firefly and a bunch of other television shows I never bothered to watch, so all I can really say about her is that she looks about ten years older than the rest of the actors.  She and her friends accidentally offed a dude and covered it up ten years ago, which led to her leaving West Virginia, but now she's back as an important journalist...who is on assignment to cover the Mothman Festival in that town.  This triggers the appearance of our titular monster, who despite being described as a "relentless demon of evil who punishes those doing wrong," apparently was okay chilling for a decade waiting for one dumb broad to come back.

So, you ask, how does Mothman work?  Why, with the well known affinity of moths towards mirrors, he is able to poke himself out of any reflective surface to getcha!  I wish I was kidding!  The first death immediately nullifies any potential creepiness of the concept, where the reflective surface is the side of a metal mobile home.  Still, it might have been a sort of intriguing concept if not for the fact that the film makes it impossible to understand the limits of Mothman's power.  In one death, Mothman murders via a car's rear view mirror, but later on is flummoxed by not being able to fit through a 24-inch television screen.  In some cases, shattering the mirror slows down the monster, but in another part all that destroying the mirror does is have the shards magically come to life and stab into the person.  Sometimes Mothman is able to punch through a car, sometimes he can be batted away by a slender woman.  

The monster's motivations and weaknesses are similarly impossible to figure out.  We're told that the monster only punishes those that pervert justice, but in the film's "climax" scene, he's just flitting around killing random people at the fair, including cops (I'm not willing to believe this is social commentary, sorry).  In a flashback we're shown that he was responsible for a bridge collapse that killed three ne'erdowells, but it also killed a score of other people.*  So is Mothman just a dick?  As for weaknesses, who in the fuck even knows.  Sometimes guns are capable of scaring Mothman away, sometimes he doesn't give a shit, sometimes he's caught in an explosion and just walks away.  We're told Mothman is repelled by sunlight, despite the number of scenes before and after this where he's attacking in the middle of the day.

Perhaps the reason for this mess is that alot of the info for this comes from the stereotypical Crazy Old Man, played by Jerry Leggio.  Ignoring the fact that despite living in the town for most of their lives, none of the cast has ever even heard of COM, they still immediately rely on him for information.  One of the two inadvertently hilarious images of the film is the lead actress looking through his handbook on the Mothman, which is supposed to be full of creepy imagery but instead is nothing but vague scribblings of the sort seen in coloring books where someone refused to obey the lines.**  

I suppose I should warn of SPOILERS when saying that in a shocking twist, he's sort of on the side of Mothman because of the guilt he feels for his own crimes (leading him to put out his eyes because apparently you have to see the Mothman to die from him, though needless to say like every other rule that's ALSO proven wrong later on).  He gives the protagonists the means to "banish" the Mothman, but this turns out to actually summon him fulltime.  But then he also gives the heroine some knife that actually does kill the Mothman.  But then it turns out in one of the stupidest TWIZT endings even among Syfy Originals, the heroine is possessed maybe by the Mothman?  So was the COM a double agent? END SPOILERS BUT YOU SHOULD READ THEM ANYWAY

Of course, even if there was anything approaching internal logic, the movie would be fucking terrible.  One notable difference of Mothman from some other Syfy originals is that they actually were willing to show our monster man pretty early.  This isn't a good thing, since Mothman looks like a garbage bag with red flesh light eyes and $5 wal-mart monster hands.  The deaths are similarly boring, since all Mothman does is grab people and turn them into spilled chili or spill strawberry sauce on them.

Ultimately, I don't regret watching Mothman, since it's rare to see a movie this internally mindfucked.  I'm not going to shittalk the writers, since imdb revealed they're generally staff writers for television (including It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia), so the more likely story is meddling from on high, especially considering the climax is a fucking attack at a carnival, which is roughly half of the climaxes in Syfy originals.  But, jesus christ, what a mess.

*: It should be noted that the actual Mothman attack is just it swooping down at the victims in a convertible, so it's really unclear how this caused a bridge collapse.  No doubt Mirror Powers were involved, though.

**: the second inadvertantly hilarious scene is a shot of the heroine throwing her rear view mirror out of the car, to which he see Mothman sullenly waving its claws out of.  Truly, the high point of modern horror.

The Chernobyl Diaries

There's a fantasy I like to have about The Chernobyl Diaries. 

Once it was just a nice little script.  Some aspiring, slightly dopey screenwriter that had watched Stalker while drunk and realized, in perhaps the most influential moment of his life, "hey, nobody has done a slasher movie INSIDE Chernobyl!"  He sets to work, watching a Discovery Channel documentary about the disaster, googling "Geiger Counter Ghostbusters Sigourney Weaver nude," and trying to come up with an interesting hook for the killer before throwing his hands up in the air and jotting down "ATOMIC MUTANT."  Eventually, the script it finished.  It's not really good, but there's some decent scare scenes, a boobie or two, and enough gore for those indie horror fans.  The script is shipped around, but there's not alot of interest, and eventually the screenwriter is exhausted of the whole process, vowing not to bother another bored talent scout with his dumb script ever again.

Six months later, there's a call.  Three hours later, our hero is in a comfortable office, talking to some so and so executive from Warner Brothers.  He loves the script, and thinks there's a good chance that it could become a feature move.  The executive leans forward and smiles, his teeth filed to pointed ends.  "There's just a few changes we'd like to make," he says as his hand goes around his chair, grabbing an ax with the words "PG-13" carved into the handle.

---

Of course, this is almost certainly not even close to the truth.  I don't want to admit it, but there's probably a ready corps of shitty screenwriters that have no problems with pumping out PG-13 horror for the film off-season.  The screenwriter didn't see Stalker, but instead thought that abandoned amusement park scene from Call of Duty 4 was so cool.  And Chernobyl Diaries isn't the worst film in that gang, but it really exemplifies everything that makes me hate current commercial horror films.

The first thing to know about The Chernobyl Diaries is that you absolutely should not watch it for a "so bad it's good" feeling.  This is because, for a movie that can't even muster a 90-minute running time, it takes just about an hour until something actually happens.  Until then, you're forced to watch a bunch of cis-white scum college fucks bumbling around Ukraine at large, then Chernobyl under the pretense of an EXTREME TOUR.  Despite the insinuation in the title that this might be some awful found footage thing, the film can't even muster that aside from some WACKY HIJINKS in the opening credits and one spooky scene found on a blooooody handheld caaaaaaaaaaameraaaaa which, even by the basement standards of the found footage trashboat, is so disorganized and clunky it's a good thing we just got standard cinematography for this shitheap.

None of the characters are remotely likeable, of course.  There's the sensible brother and the wild brother, the boring blonde engaged to the sensible brother, the brunette that the wild brother wants to bang.  Eventually this CORE GROUP is met by the boring Russian tour guide who naturally dies first, and some European mishmash couple or something who fucking cares.

Even when they get to Chernobyl for their big tour, nothing happens for awhile.  They walk through some abandoned house and see the spooky amusement park, then someone sees something but it's nothing and JESUS HAS IT BEEN 55 MINUTES ALREADY THIS MOVIE JUST ZOOMING BY.  The baddies eventually attack, but since this is a PG-13 movie and nobody knows how to make scenes creepy anymore, it's just jump cuts and blood stains on the floor.  There's a scene where one of the ladies is abducted by the marauding mutant men, and not found until about 15 minutes later, where she's clearly in emotional shock but still wearing all her clothes.  It takes a very special kind of movie which manages to both be extremely gross and yet deny the viewer his prurient pound of flesh.  Good job, Chernobyl Diaries!

There's just one more thing I want to say about Chernobyl Diaries before I can never think about this shitty film again, a thing that really encapsulates everything that needs to be said about it.

When the Bore Crew rolls into Chernobyl, they stop at some river or lake for a breather.  There's a failed jump scare, then someone throws a piece of jerky into the water for some reason.  They leave, but the camera stays on the beef jerky, before being PULLED UNDER THE WATER.  Sad to say, this is probably the closest thing this movie comes to actually being...anything really.  So what's the payoff for this set up, you ask?

Later on after the monster dudes have revealed themselves, the survivors are running away from about three small dogs (don't fucking ask), and have to cross a 20 foot river via a rotting footbridge.  The first few people make it across, but then a rung in the bridge breaks!  Some one falls off into knee-deep water! But no, the terror isn't over, because some underpaid intern is in the water making splashing noises while the actor screams in terror over something we can't see!  Then he wades across in five seconds, only to reveal that his leg was slightly scratched.

The Chernobyl Diaries.

976-EVIL II (1991)

I'm always torn how to review mediocre horror that is fully, gleefully aware of how mediocre it is.  I know how to deal with terrible that overplays its terrible; you call it shit that doesn't get any better because hurr hurr tongue in cheek.  But how do you deal with something that seems to have been developed solely with the intent of entertaining shut-ins who love them some USA "Up All Night" and Monstervision?  I'm not saying that the people that produced Terrorvision or Slugs or basically anything from Full Moon Productions weren't aware that they were developing stupid, cinematically unimportant movies, but there isn't the same overt pandering to my scene as there was in 976-EVIL 2.  I mean, look at this:

yeah, that's a reference to Corman and Monstervision's Joe Bob Briggs.  I don't even

And while it bugs me, truth be told, I sort of liked this movie.

The original 976-EVIL was notable for two things:

• It was directed by Robert Englund
• It had one of the lamer plot frameworks for what amounted to "evil demon terrorizes people" 

I barely remember the first one, honestly.  All I really recall was its surreal mish-mash of various horror aesthetics, with it completely unclear what kind of horror it wanted to be, trying to push heartstrings with the central conflict between the tough softy biker and his nerdy cousin with some weird revenge fantasy and it's just an enormous goddamned mess.

The sequel, to its quasi-credit, has no problems with this.  It very clearly a Nightmare on Elm Street rip-off awkwardly melded with the distinguishing feature of the first film, an "evil" pay phone service that tells your HORRORSCOPE while slowly turning you evil.

So here's the terrifying title shot.

I can't really stress enough how clumsily shoehorned the whole "evil phone service" concept is.  As in here, every so often when something spooky happens, there is a ringing phone but it rings kind of evil like?  Whatever.

Because this is generic late 80's/early 90's horror, we open with a lady getting naked.  I guess the twist here is that after the initial spook, instead of getting dressed to the boos and jeers of a suitably drunk audience, she instead puts on a slightly trashier version of what Sigourney Weaver wore at the end of Alien.  I should note that despite this really trashy fanservice at the beginning, there's literally nothing in else in the way of nudity for the rest of the film.  So if this film is your only hope on those lonely Friday nights, you better finish quickly unless you've got a fetish for horribad early 90's fashion.

Anyway.  She's menaced not very well by this guy:

This is Rene Assa. I kept thinking I had seen him before, but as far as IMDB was concerned, he was just a bit character actor who had this movie as one of his primary roles.  I'm not really sure what to make of his performance, as while he's not a terrible Freddy Krueger stand-in (to the point that they literally have his face start melting towards the end), there's something forced and kind of sad about forcing a 50-year-old man to fart out endless corny one-lines like "let's put...the pedal to the metal, as they saaaaaay."  Sometimes he seems to be having fun and other times he's just embarrassed to be there.

At any rate, Assa kills the woman via college drama club stalactite (no, really, but it's not as cool as you think), but is arrested.  We find out he's been calling the 976-EVIL hotline, and has the hots for his student assistant, who is also the police commissioner's daughter.  We don't know if these two character traits are connected, as this movie (wisely, as far as I'm concerned) skips the original film's plot about being driven evil by the hotline, so we never know if Assa was just a prick, or if he was corrupted by insane phone fees.  The script doesn't help, as there are a few scenes where Assa is all tender and friendly to his assistant, and other times he's all "gonna eat ur soul lol."

Assa quickly gains REAL ULTIMATE POWER, being able to astral project himself, which in this film means really awkward scene within a scene effects.  One curious part of 976-EVIL II is that really virtually every special effect that isn't an exploding car is something from one frame going into another.  Or whatever you call it.  I'm not Tom Savini.

They really should have called the movie We Bought This Greenscreen, We're Going to Use It Goddamnit.

Unfortunately, there's not alot of kill scenes in this movie.  We have:

1.  Assa killing the drunk janitor who witnessed the murder by holding him in front of a semi (with a fairly satisfying gib explosion)
2. A prosecutor, Monique Gabrielle (that chick that got naked in Bachelor Party and Deathstalker II, but not here, hmmmmmmm) having her car possessed and exploding after a really long sequence of her running into other cars.
3. Some dead policemen.

There's actually one more scene, but god help me, it's probably one of the most creative I've seen in a long time.  Don't worry, no explanation is needed here.

Some notes here (AFTER YOU WATCHED IT DON'T PEEK):

1. The decision to hide the awkward effects via black and white is pretty clever. 
2. The subsequent scene was creepy enough that I didn't even mind that the movie was totally wrong when it had the girl say that the end of the movie had the zombies breaking into the farmhouse and eating everyone.
3. I especially didn't mind when they even included the driving gloves from Barbara's brother on one of the zombies reaching from the door.

I'm bewildered by this scene.  In a movie with almost no competence whatsoever, you get an honest to god clever tribute to a horror classic with almost nothing to complain about.  Unfortunately, it's probably the only thing five minutes in this film worth anyone's time.

Aside from Assa, everyone is just bad.  Main girl is bad.  They actually got the biker dude, Spike, from the first film, but I don't know if he was this awful before or what but it's a damned good thing he basically does nothing useful for ninety minutes aside from wearing alot of leather and sharing a scene with Brigitte Nielsen as an occult specialist, which goes about as you'd expect it to when the actors are wearing stuff like this:

The real kicker is the ending.  Everything culminates with the girl trying to kill Assa while Spike's motorcycle fights Assa's astral projection's semi-truck (with more predictable results).  Both fail, and Assa chases the girl to some rocky seacoast and then Spike's Astral projection appears and knocks Assa over the cliff but then they kiss and Spike turns into space dust.

Dumb, but all right.  All we want is a good twist ending.  You ready?  The police come, and ask the girl who killed Assa.  She says Spike, but her dad says Spike died an hour ago.  Then she's arrested for killing Assa.  As she's loaded onto the ambulance, handcuffed, camera pans right to show a phone booth.  RING RING FUCK YOU AUDIENCE THE END.

I'd probably be alot meaner towards this movie if not for that death scene.  I'm not sure I would have hated it per se even then, since it's not like it's trying to be anything more than horror movie junk, but at the same time, it's trying so hard to be that junk I'm not sure what to think.  Reverse ambition?  Maybe I just need to call a helpline or something.

Wishermaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell

What is it about horror sequels that are filmed concurrently?  Return of the Living Dead 4 &5 were filmed at the same time, and now, as I decide to review Wishmaster 3, I find out that both it and Wishermaster 4 were also filmed at the same time.

Now, it's not that Wishmaster 1 & 2 were shining achievements of movie genius.  For all intents, the original was Wes Craven reallocating some of his Nightmare on Elm Street profits into a new "Monster whose power is creating interesting special effects."  Unlike Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven skipped any attempt to make the Wishmaster, an evil genie/djinn who tricks people into wishing, then FLIPS THE WISH SCRIPT.  The plot for both movies is negligible, but it had a couple of things going for it, primarily a great deal of awesome SFX setpieces, and the acting of Andrew Divoff as the Djinn, who perfectly captured the lighly gruesome tone of the movie.  If you're curious, here's a compilation of the death scenes from the first two movies.  The second movie is worse than the first, though I'd argue that Divoff's role, and the intelligence of the film makers to make the sequel basically a complete retread of the first, still makes it entertaining.

Wishmaster 3 focuses on Diane, a TA or something at a college who suffered a Big Tragedy as a kid where her parents were blown up in a car accident that she witnessed.  There's a terrible romantic subplot where she can't say that she loves her boyfriend (who is taking the class she is TA-ing in).  In a giant warning flag about the level of cinematic excellence, after a nightmare in the opening scene, Diane goes outside just so we can see her erect nipples.

Diane also has to work at the college Museum of Creepy Artifacts, and for some reason is allowed to look at some box that is a direct rip-off of the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser.  Djinn is eventually released, and possesses Diane's creepy professor, and here we get to the first big problem of the movie.  Jason Connery isn't a terrible actor, but he lacks the crazy bug-eyed scenery chewing of Divoff, and his facial hair just makes him look like a metrosexual version of Robert Patrick from Double Dragon.

The confrontation between the Djinn and Creepy Professor is one of the better/worse parts of the movie.  After Diane leaves the Professor after his terrible come-on, the Djinn just appears and glides across the floor.  Djinn demands to find the person woke him (the central theme of every Wishmaster theme being that the person who unleashed the Djinn must make three wishes, thereupon a shitload of Djinn will awake and rule the earth), and he refuses.  Djinn first offers him some hot women, but when he hesitates, we get this:

I'm not really sure what the Djinn is going for here.  He's blackmailing the professor, but it's never made clear how the Djinn would approach the Sociology Chair and Board of Directors with this revelation, since he's a giant evil hell beast.  What's weirder about all this is that the script implies that the professor understands what the Djinn is all about with "granting wishes."  But whatever, he cracks and decides to go for a carefully worded wish of "two women I find most attractive in the world to be in love with me."  This leads to what I assume is Connery's reason for being in the film, as two naked chicks start writhing all over him.  Of course, they're actually demons, which doesn't make sense in the context of the wish.

We follow with an awful sex scene between Diane's best friend and her boyfriend behind a couch where a guy is watching MTV (which also gives this movie two and a half nude scenes by the 30 minute mark).    Eventually, the Djinn goes to the administration building to find Diane's address, but is cockblocked by an elderly secretary who won't give him Diane's transcript because it's confidential (which is surprisingly accurate, I guess the movie researched FERPA), but of course she wishes that "all these files would go up in flames so I could get the hell out of here."  GUESS HOW THIS TURNS OUT, CLEVER VIEWER. It's actually better than you think, as the woman proceeds to open up a file cabinet and get a jet of flames right to the face.

WOOMPH

What follows is 20 minutes of Diane going SOMETHING IS WRONG and everyone going NOPE YOU CRAZY, until for some reason the Djinn reveals himself in front of Diane's boyfriend.  He and Diane flee to a church, where the Djinn is waiting for them, along with Random Slut #1.  Diane refuses to wish citing that the Djinn can't hurt them without a wish being made, to which the Djinn is all "thas cool oh btw Random Slut #1 already made a wish wanted to lose some weight want to wish nao? :3"  She refuses at first, so we get a vomiting scene that less gross than that from City of the Living Dead.  Diane, being a retarded bint, gives in and wishes to end Random Slut #1's pain, which goes about how you'd think.

She then makes the second wish, which suddenly propels this movie from a crappy sequel to utter disaster: "I wish to invoke the spirit of St. Michael to help me."  Yes.  That is the wish.  The Djinn actually grants this one, but apparently the spirit has to inhabit a body.  Initially she gets possessed, but then the boyfriend shoves her out of the way.  And lo, Greg the Boyfriend gets blue contacts, and super-deep voice, and a curvy-bladed sword that was bought for 59.99 at some craft store.  Djinn transforms into his demon form, and a pretty goddamned embarassing fight proceeds, where the Djinn throws a pew at Michael, and Michael reverses with a armflip into the altar.

 LOOK AT THIS GODDAMNED SWORD

The final 30 minutes of the film alternate between Diane and Michael the Angel running from the Djinn (occasionally with Michael berating Diane about her dumb fucking decisions), while he randomly kills her friends.  The rundown includes:

• Random Slut #2 wishes for heart to be broken, which features a really bad cross-section of her heart exploding, like a Ghost being exploded in Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt.  Which basically makes me wish I was watching that instead (Stocking is mai waifu).

 NON DES KAAAAAAAAH

• Diane's best friend's boyfriend gets beaten up by the Djinn, eventually wishing for the Djinn to "Blow Him," which culminates in him getting floated in front of the Djinn, who literally blows him into a bull statue.
• Finally the best friend, which features the most brutal kill in the series.  Djinn chases her into some animal research lab.  She hides from him in some cabinet, and for some reason, the Djinn just gives up and leaves the room.  In possibly the worst decision of the series, she calls Diane and says "I wish there was somewhere to hide."  For some reason this instantly summons the Djinn, who carries her across the lab and stuffs her head into a rat cage, telling her "NO ONE WILL FIND YOU IN HERE LOL."  Now, while it's not like the Wishmaster series has high logic standards to uphold, but I don't think being stuffed in a rat cage really works as a place to hide in any connotation, especially as Diana immediately finds her.

The conclusion of the film is another stupid fight scene between the djinn and Michael duelling with the sword and a flag pole, culminating in Michael cutting off the Djinn's hand (which of course instantly regenerates).  The two flee in a car, Djinn jumps on it, and ultimately more stupid shit just happens until OH IRONY SHE CRASHES THE CAR THE SAME WAY AS HER PARENTS DIED.  But this time she rescues Michael!  In probably the only awesome scene of the movie, the Djinn, whose entire body is broken, slowly realigns his broken legs and arms while making cooing sounds.

Oh and in the end Diana realizes that she could just kill herself before making the third wish, but then the Djinn catches her arm just before she throws herself off a building.  She then telepathically grab Michael's sword, stabs the Djinn, both fall and die but Michael just casts Life 3 and yay everyone lives again.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WISHMASTER III

So, what is there to say?  If you get the mien to watch a movie directed by someone actually named Chris Angel, use that handy thumbnail function on the Netflix instant viewer to find the death scenes, as there is nothing else going for this movie.  Still, it at least had the wisdom to retain the whole basic plotline, which is better than I can say for Wishmaster IV, which is literally a romance involving the Djinn.  NOPE. NOT KIDDING.