A Scream Is A Wish Your Heart Makes

Year: 1997

Director: Robert Kurtzman

Cast: Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Robert Englund

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

It's that time of year again, folks! Every October I begin a brand new deep dive into a franchise I've never covered on the blog before. Now, consider this fact: Sergio and I are now doing a lot of franchise marathons on our podcast Scream 101. So when I was picking out what series to do this year, I had to select one that was flat-out vetoed from being on the show, so the quality of these movies (which have in the past included infinite Amityville and Children of the Corn sequels) might be dropping precipitously. Pray for me. 

I hope against hope that I have struck a rich vein this year, because at the very least my favorite director Wes Craven is the producing entity that launched the franchise. I'm not saying I have any faith in the man's producing (he also made Dracula 2000, lest we forget), but at least his work is something I have a vast amount of context for and interest in. So. The Wishmaster quadrilogy. I guess we're doing this.

Here goes nothing!

Wishmaster tells the tale of an immortal djinn, so of course it starts off in a wildly misguided ancient Middle Eastern sequence. Nevertheless we learn that the titular master of wishes (Andrew Divoff) is not the babbling blue Robin Williams you've come to expect from genies in bottles. For one thing he's trapped in a gemstone. For another thing, he is a malevolent force of ancient pure evil, and if he grants three wishes to the person who releases him, he will break the veil between the human world and the djinn world, causing the apocalypse I guess. It's not super clear what the djinn would do to our world, but I'm pretty sure they're not just here for the sightseeing.

Oh, also the djinn is powerless unless somebody makes a wish, which he can then misinterpret to accomplish his desires. Upon which point he also steals their soul, which powers up the gemstone. There sure are a lot of rules for a movie about an evil genie. Anyway, jewel appraiser Alexandra Amberson (Tammy Lauren - who some people thought was too controversial to star in a horror movie about genies) releases the Djinn by... rubbing the gem on her shirt? Had nobody done this in millennia? He bursts from his gemstone prison, in the process killing her best friend/wannabe lover Josh (Tony Crane), then wanders around granting random people's wishes in a bunch of slasher setpieces before setting his sights back on her.

All while being dressed to the nines.

It is perhaps now I should mention that director Robert Kurtzman is much better known as one of the makeup effects gurus behind the KNB EFX group, a special effects company that has dominated the horror world from Elm Street 5 to Scream to The Walking Dead. As with most films directed by a special effects wizard, Wishmaster is packed to the grim with drippy, practical gore gags that still look phenomenal.

The two party scenes that bookend the film, in which all hell breaks loose during the Djinn's final bid for power, are pure, unfiltered movie mayhem. Glass shatters faces, skeletons burst out of their bodies and run around, creatures emerge from people's chests to devour other people, statues come to life and smash ancient weapons into skulls... It's chaotic, but an excellent built-in reel for KNB's next pitch meeting. 

These scenes (as well as most of the slasher setpieces that have no bearing on the actual plot) are going to be pure candy to any gorehound. Ditto the endless slew of cameos from horror icons like Robert Englund (given the meatiest role - thanks, Wes! - as a rich collector who orders the statue containing the Djinn's jewel), Kane Hodder (as a security guard, the role he was apparently born to play when not smothered in latex), Tony Todd (as a doorman, which is insulting), Angus Scrimm (as the narrator, which is perhaps less insulting because at least it's a cool trivia tidbit), Ted Raimi (as, guess what, a weaselly assistant), Reggie Bannister (as a pharmacist who gets "cancer" AKA boils that explode and kill him) and (for true devotees of cult film) George "Buck" Flower (as a bum, which he has extensive experience playing considering he's done it over 25 times since the early 80's).

Do you think he's just mad he's constantly forced to face off against people who played villains more famous than him?

And the detail in the Djinn design is something to behold. He's grotesquely organic, full of squishy parts that wiggle and move of their own accord (my favorite moment is when he's facing away from the camera and you can see a pulsing heartbeat in his back), counteracting the slight stiffness of his latex face with pure, realistic nightmare fuel.

Unfortunately, other than appealing to the basest lizard-brain instincts of the horror fan (the Where's Waldo of Horror game continues with an Easter egg Pazuzu statue in the background, etc. etc.), Wishmaster just doesn't quite have the juice to go anywhere. There's a little bit of fun to be had when the Djinn is in disguise trying and failing to trick Alexandra into making wishes, and Andrew Divoff has a blast chewing the scenery into tiny little splinters ("If you can't beat 'em, burn them... baby"), but their interactions are mostly dull as dishwater. When the film's budget briefly cools its heels late in the second act and they're required to match wits in some anonymous apartment, my interest wanes severely.

You see, there's almost nothing compelling about Alexandra as a protagonist. She's trapped in a bland Friendzone Love Story and does nothing but stumble ass backward into revelations about the Djinn despite having a convenient psychic link to him every time he makes a kill. This element is the most Wes Craven-y of a movie that quite openly suckles at the teat of Craven's filmography, and it is the most poorly handled. When a dude gets his jaw ripped off, I don't want to waste time cutting back to Tammy Lauren bulging her eyes, pursing her lips, and fainting left and right. All the interstitial bits between the horror scenes needed a punch-up or two or three before they hit the silver screen, because connective tissue isn't supposed to be tissue paper.

But there's a scene where a dude gets his jaw ripped all the way the fuck off, so who's complaining, you know?

TL;DR: Wishmaster is fun as far as turn-your-brain-off practical effects movies go, but it doesn't have too much to offer beyond its baseline pleasures.

Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1131
Reviews In This Series
Wishmaster (Kurtzman, 1997)
Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies (Sholder, 1999)
Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (Angel, 2001)
Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled (Angel, 2002)

Census Bloodbath: Cheers For Fears

For our Scream 101 episode about this very film, click here.

Year: 1988

Director: John Quinn

Cast: Betsy Russell, Leif Garrett, Lucinda Dickey

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

After intense examination, I have concluded that the period between about 1986 and 1988 is when the cheesiest, most vomitously unfashionable concentration of campiness hit the slasher genre. Unfortunately, right around this period is when the subgenre was in its most severe decline. The glut of slashers had been flooding the market since 1980, only increasing in strength following the home video boom of the mid-80’s. Of course, when a high pressure perm front meets a low pressure quality snap, you get a maelstrom of memorable bad-good delights.

Take Cheerleader Camp. A woods-based slasher flick that was exactly too late to meet its prime market, it’s still a memorably entertaining crapfest. Co-produced, by – of all companies – the Japanese Daiei Films (progenitors of the Gamera franchise), Cheerleader Camp is deliriously out of touch with anything resembling reality.

Starting with the campers’ ages, which bottom out at about, oh, 32.

Camp Hurrah. Where dreams come true. Where men can be men and women can be topless. The particular cheerleading group we will be following is from Lindo Valley, composed of the cooing nymphette Pam (Teri Weigel, who you might recognize from Lesbian Babysitters 5), the blonde bubblehead Bonnie (Lorie Griffin), the Ethnic One Theresa (Rebecca Ferratti), the requisite fat prankster Timmy (Travis McKenna), the sweet, doting mascot Cory (Lucinda Dickey), the lascivious team captain with a gravity-defying hairline Brent (Leif Garrett), and his girlfriend Alison (Betsy Russell, who would later marry another onscreen psycho – Jigsaw. She appeared as his wife Jill in Saw IV-VII). Alison has been plagued by bad dreams, because you saw how much money that Freddy movie made, right?

When people who defy Alison start dying under mysterious circumstances, Alison worries that not all might be right in her mind. Is she killing these people? Or is it somebody else? The snobby camp owner Deedee Tipton (Vickie Benson)? Pop (Buck Flower of Maniac Cop, Pumpkinhead, and a million other things), the leering handyman with the Southern drawl who feels transplanted from some other movie entirely? When the killer turns their sights on the Lindo Valley team, their cheerleading getaway quickly becomes a bloody fiasco.

They did NOT stick the landing.

You’d think from that setup that Cheerleader Camp would be more or less a boob showcase, highlighting the best and bustiest of today’s youth. But take a look at that calendar, sucker. This is 1988, and the MPAA had long since choked out the genre’s capacity for sleaze like a pernicious weed. Although there IS a highly amusing sequence that could only be classified as a Bikini Removal contest, this is largely an exploitation-free zone. Shirts are practically super glued on, and the gore is shooed offscreen (though, in the few kills that do have blood, the effects are shockingly solid).

What Cheerleader Camp does have in spades to make up for its deficiencies is pure, unadulterated lunacy. Three characters in particular have tapped into a rich vein of incredulity. While Alison, Brent, and Pam stumble their way through a musty, run-of-the-mill slasher pic, Timmy, Miss Tipton, and pop the handyman are quietly constructing a Looney Tunes cartoon on the sidelines.

While Timmy spies on bathing women using a periscope and decked out in full Mrs. Doubtfire regalia, Miss Tipton (who could totally be played by Judy Greer in the remake) gets blasted on cocktails and has nudity-free cheerleading themed sex with the local sheriff. You’d think that description would be enough to sufficiently explain the nature of that scene, but you would be dead wrong. Deedee Tipton is a shining paragon of inexplicable slasher sexuality, and this convoluted, needlessly detailed scene is so crazy go nuts that it’s worth the price of admission alone. I mean, you can catch Cheerleader Camp for free on YouTube, but it’s such a sterling scene it’s legitimately worth paying actual human money for.

And then there’s Pop. Actor Buck Flower knows exactly where this movie stands in the pantheon of cinema (he was in Back to the Future and Escape from New York, so I’m pretty sure he knows that Cheerleader Camp is not his career peak), so he goes hog wild, ad-libbing all his lines and not giving half a hoot if his character makes sense. He is an endless repository of folksy, down-South sayings and lecherous, sweaty hyperbole that will stun your mind into submission. He’s the only genuinely good actor here, and his screen presence is like a giant electromagnet.

He’s a true role model.

While most of Cheerleader Camp’s fun falls into the unintentional bad-good category, there is a primitive but surprisingly effective sense of humor at work here. A scene of the mascots attempting to eat lunch while still in costume is as funny and well-shot as any contemporaneous ten comedy. And there are a handful of clever cuts that provide punchlines through the film’s editing itself, which is a level of comedic foresight almost unknown in the genre.

So as much as I want to hate Cheerleader Camp for its plot (which is as dense as a sponge, skipping through a loosely linked series of vignettes) its dreadful third act (which hinges on a red herring the screenwriter couldn’t be bothered to call out attention to and is basically a perpetual motion machine of teens running through underlit woods), or its total lack of scares (save for two nightmare scenes which are appropriately surreal), Cheerleader Camp is still a bucket of bloody fun. It’s not as recommendable a bad movie as, say, Killer Party, but it certainly has more focused, solid material than a Girls Nite Out. Don’t rush out to see it, but if you stumble across Cheerleader Camp in a dusty bargain bin, at least give it a second thought.

Killer: Cory (Lucinda Dickey)

Final Girl: Alison (Betsy Russell)

Best Kill: Pam’s “hedge clippers through the back of the skull” demise is shear ecstasy.

Sign of the Times: Every time the camera cuts back to Theresa, her hair is teased about a foot taller.

Scariest Moment: In a nightmare, Alison’s pom poms slice her arms open like razors.

Weirdest Moment: While being chased through the woods, Timmy decides to take a break to film a monologue – and then decides to take a piss, all while still filming.

Champion Dialogue: “That judge in the orange skirt… Make yer peepee harder than a ten pound bag of nickel jawbreakers.”

Body Count: 9; 7 perpetrated by the killer, 1 by a gaggle of scared cheerleaders, and the last by the Final Girl herself.

1. Suzy’s wrists are slit.
2. Pam is stabbed through the skull with shears.
3. Theresa is hit with a van.
4. Deedee is cleavered in the back.
5. Timmy is axed in the tummy.
6. Sheriff has his head crushed with a bear trap.
7. Pop is shot to death.
8. Bonnie is strangled with a phone cord.
9. Brent is shot.

TL;DR: Cheerleader Camp is a weak, late entry in the slasher genre, but it's silly enough to be diverting.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1197