It's quite sad when you come to think of it, but "Wishmaster" actually is one of the better American horror films of the nineties... It's absolutely no masterpiece of plotting, it's short on tension and atmosphere and the premise is very ridicule, yet it's amusing and reasonable well-made junk that spoils the gorehounds among us. "Wishmaster" brings forward a new type of bogeyman; the evil genie in the lamp (only he's stuck in a piece of jewelry here) who makes every wish come true in an atrocious and ambiguous way. Supposedly, he only requires to fulfill three wishes for the person who woke him and then the ugly Djinn can unleash his evil troops upon the world and wipe out humanity. Tammy Lauren (who mainly just did TV-work before) is the heroine who stupidly has to trick the malevolent Djinn back into his emerald for good (...or at least until the next sequel). What this movie really lacks is a director! Robert Kurtzman is credited as such but he's a special effects and make-up guy to the backbone and he obviously spent more time supervising the gory eye-candy than putting any coherence in his film. Result: everything is well as long as the story only handles about exploding body parts, but when two or more characters are having a conversation it hurts your ears. The Djinn is a fairly ingenious horror icon, only he talks too much and he shouldn't try to be funny (remember, that's what made Freddie Krueger a lot less scary as well). If "Wishmaster" would have been made 20 years earlier, I'm sure that Robert Englund's part was played by Peter Cushing! Englund is the rich and eccentric collector who cares more about a rare artwork than human lives and his vanity indirectly is the origin of all the horror. Englund plays a rather big role while other famous genre actors appear in smaller, insignificant roles. We have Tony Todd ("Candyman"), Kane Hodder ("Jason Vorhees"), Reggie Bannister and Angus Scrimm (both "Phantasm") all making cameo-appearances, which makes this film slightly more interesting for hardcore-horror fans. This movie will definitely impress younger and enthusiast gore-fanatics whose only experiences with horror so far were flicks like "Scream" or "Urban Legends".... I can imagine "Wishmaster" really looks cooler than cool for them!
Review of Wishmaster
