Wishcraft
(2002)
review by Suspiriorum

Our geeky hero Brett Bumpers (Michael Weston) is in love with Samantha (Alexandra Holden) the most beautiful girl in school. Sadly, the only interest she has in him is for the extra tutoring that he provides her with in History class. Then, one day a mysterious parcel arrives in the post with a note attached which says that this gift will provide for him three wishes. So naturally, being an intelligent & thoughtful guy, he wishes for Samantha to go to the Spring Dance with him, which she does. At the same time, & strange demonic figure appears & starts killing.

Yes it’s the old slasher thing again, with a 20-something "teen" cast getting killed by some nasty demon-looking creature. And I have to admit that I’m a huge sucker for such things, but Wishcraft is pretty poor going for the most part. It gets far too bogged down in the teen angst angle with the forced love story between Brett & Samantha to provide sufficient entertainment for genre fans, & after introducing the killer, the film then almost completely forgets about him for about half an hour. The teen characters barely even acknowledge his existence, for much of the film going about their own business in a pretty boring & bland manner.

Many recent slashers have tried to gain kudos by having genre favourites appearing, such as Jeffrey Combs in I Still Know, or Robert Englund in Urban Legend. Here, we get Poltergeists’ Zelda Rubinstein making a cameo as a coroner (the best bit of the film, but very brief). Meat Loaf also turns up as a policeman, but that’s about as much fun as you are likely to get.

In it’s defence, Wishcraft does feature two or three daftly inventive deaths, such as the bowling ball sequence, that somehow manage to stop it from being a complete waste of time. Sadly, the climax suddenly makes all these moments make absolutely no sense whatsoever. There’s the suggestion that this is some evil, demonic entity at work, but this angle is completely fluffed & thrown away in favour of convention. The very end is entirely objectionable on just so many levels that I would have been vomiting in my popcorn if I had any.

It has been suggested that the film is all done tongue-in-cheek, maybe as a spoof that doesn’t need to constantly tell us that it’s not serious (unlike Scream). But if that’s the case, then the film needs to be considerably more fun & entertaining than this.

I really love slasher films, but I don’t think many people will disagree with me when I say stop. Please, please, please, please, please, quit it with the teen slasher films. No more, please. The money should be used to make a proper horror film instead. Although that might mean that they end up making a film which someone actually wants to see – because very, very few will want to see Wishcraft.