31 Days of Horror: "Wishmaster 2"

by Sean McTiernan

In most genres the self-indulgence of actors is not something people usually enjoy, at least not intentionally. Sure, people have accidentally enjoyed I’m Still Here, perhaps mistaking it for a sketch where Zach Galifianakis is experiencing lengthy side effects from a surgery to make him taller. Mostly though, people like their actors to suffer. They have to lose weight (like Christian Bale in The Machinist), bulk up (like Christan Bale for Batman) or put a lot of work into inhabiting the mind of a disabled person (like Christian Bale on the set of Terminator Salvation).

But with horror villains, the opposite is true. The more a horror movie actor indulges himself and camps it up, the more horror nerds enjoy it. Some guys get the absurdity of this and are cool about it: Doug Bradley, who plays Pinhead, seems like a lovely man who both respects his character’s legacy but totally gets he’s not the world’s Most Important Thespian. Others tend to let it go to their head a bit: Robert Englund’s answer to an interview question put to him in 1989 about what Freddie represents is reportedly still going on and not expected to end until somewhere around December 2012.

And although camping it up has great value, you’ve got to do it right. Self-indulgence is good, but it takes an amount of skill to finesse it in a way that lets the audience share in it. That’s why Bruce Campbell and Jeffrey Combs are regarded rightly as genius splat practitioners, but also why a rating than zero had to be invented for Repo: The Genetic Opera. When it comes to doing it right, today’s movie features one of the great unsung examples of horror-movie scenery chewing.

You’ll probably recognise Andrew Divoff from his role as Mikhail Bakunin, the character responsible most of the best bits of “Lost.’ You might even recognise him from some of his many turns as Bad Guy Who Kills People in various TV shows. But the first two Wishmaster movies, especially the second, will always be his best performances for me. Because, although he always plays scumbags with glorious abandon, these two films are the ones in which he has the most fun.

The story in the Wishmaster movies is wholly unimportant. Andrew Divoff plays Djinn: a demon who, apart from wearing human skin, makes absolutely no attempt to hide the fact he is a demon. Both Wishmaster One and Two basically take the form of a series of vignettes where he dicks people over using his magical powers. You see, Djinn can do whatever he wants but technically has to use his power to fulfill someone’s wish (hence the title). So what we get to see is Djinn engaging unwitting victims in matches of syntax jousting until they finally to succumb to using the word “wish” in a sentence or even, it seems, expressing any sort of desire for anything. Djinn then swiftly twists the meaning of their words to kill them in uniformly gruesome ways reminiscent of any of the cheesier “Twilight Zone” twists. (Yes, eagle-eyed reader that is Kane Hodder, the most famous of the stuntmen to play Jason, in the role of unsuspecting, disgruntled security guard )

This would be great on its own, but Divoff’s performance takes it to the next level. The smary slime that drips off every syllable he puts out there disturbs not only the characters he deals with, but the actors. Most of these people are just trying to get through a low-budget movie they’d rather not be part of so it’s always great to see them slam up against the inimitably creepy brick wall that is Divoff’s gloriously grisly and serpentine performance. Even in musical theatre people usually can’t get this hammy without provoking homicidal rage in everyone involved. Divoff, though, captures the ridiculousness of the concept and the old-fashioned evil genie angle so perfectly with every evil stare and over pronunciation of the word “wishes” you can’t help but cheer him on.

Remarkably when you see Djinn in his real, supposedly more menacing form, it only serves as a disappointment compared to what Divoff has been doing up then with just two eyes, a controlled growl and a menacing row of pearly whites. A rubber suit can’t compare to practised creepiness.

The comparisons between the Wishmaster movies and Hellraiser are unavoidable. The antagonist is trapped in an ancient object, it’s all about the dangers of desiring too much and, of course, there’s the rubbery monster (in fairness to Wishmaster, the design of Djinn is far more HR Giger than Clive Barker). What’s so great about Wishmaster is it takes all the things Hellraiser fans hated about the movies from Hellraiser 3 on and completely revels in them.

Djinn swears like a modern day criminal, he kills people in the campiest way possible, there’s no real moral to what he does and he always-always-goes for the corniest joke possible. The first two Wishmaster movies replaces all the psychosexual leanings and pseudo-intellectual pomposity of the Hellraiser movies with a much sillier and humorous take while keeping the theatrical demonic protagonist and the themes of spearing people on their own desires. Not everyone looked at Hellraiser and thought “Man, this’d be great if it had way more puns and way less leather,” but I certainly revisit the adventures of Djinn more than the trials and tribulations of Pinhead.

I only recommended the second movie because, let’s face it, as much as you trust me I can’t see you dedicating more than 90 minutes of your life to a Wishmaster movie. If you’re wondering about Wishmaster Three and Four: don’t. To qoute the best comedy mind of our generation, I wouldn’t watch those movies if they were playing in my glasses. Why the second one over the first? There’s a couple of reasons.

To begin, the side story with the shrill women who is supposed to be the hero is much more entertainingly daft in the second film. “Morgana” (I know, right?) is like if the TV show “Charmed” were a person, minus the witchcraft. Her teaming up with a burly holy man, whose name is Walker Texas Priest (if you’re me and make fun movies as you watch them), is so bizarre and ridiculous it makes a low key humorous counterpoint to the belly laughs to be gleaned from the Djinn sections.

More importantly though, Wishmaster 2 is where Divoff really overacted the shit out of the Djinn role to amazing results. However over-the-top you thought the previous clips were, the last four I’m going to leave you with should also leave zero doubt in your mind about how good someone can make schlock movie acting if they really get their teeth in to it.

Sean Mc Tiernan has a blog and a twitter. So does everyone, though. He also has a podcast on which he has a nervous breakdown once an episode, minimum.You should totally email him with your questions / insults/ offers of tax-free monetary gifts.