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After the rather disappointing second movie, I was hoping Wishmaster 3 would grant me one simple wish: a good Wishmaster movie. Surely, that’s not too much to ask? A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 proved that a third installment can breathe new life into a horror franchise. Then again, the law of diminishing returns tends to kick in sooner rather than later with these things, so perhaps I should keep my expectations in check.
College student Diana accidentally frees an evil Djinn who takes the form of her professor and begins granting wishes with gruesome consequences. With her friends in danger, Diana must find a way to stop him before he can unleash Hell on Earth.
Subtitles can serve a purpose. In franchises like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, they usually give you a pretty good idea of what to expect from the movie. That’s not the case with Wishmaster 3, whose alternative subtitle, Beyond the Gates of Hell, sounds suitably ominous but has little to do with what actually happens. Unless hell turns out to be a school and its surrounding campus, we never really go beyond any gates of hell.
Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell is a movie that manages to be both vastly different from its predecessors and almost exactly the same. The story has been regurgitated once again: a young woman accidentally frees the Djinn from his confinement, prompting him to assume a human form and hunt her down while tricking people into making wishes along the way. Meanwhile, she experiences visions of his gruesome deeds, investigates what’s going on, and eventually figures out how to defeat him through some cleverly worded wishes. Gee, I wonder what Wishmaster 4 could possibly have in store for me.
The biggest difference lies in the movie’s style and tone. Andrew Divoff is nowhere to be found, and the role is now split between Jason Connery, Sean Connery’s son, who plays the Djinn’s human form, and John Novak, who takes over the demonic incarnation. Connery plays a sleazy professor with an unhealthy interest in his female students. While he lacks both his father’s charisma and the acting chops needed to make the character particularly memorable, he does manage to come across as sufficiently creepy. Novak, on the other hand, goes gloriously over the top as the Djinn, clearly having a blast with the role. Unfortunately, he barely gets any screen time, leaving Connery to carry most of the load.
Wishmaster 3 is set almost entirely on a college campus and features plenty of young, attractive students played by actors in their mid-to-late twenties. Combined with the bright but rather flat cinematography, the movie looks more like one of those teen dramas that were popular in the ’90s and ’00s, only with an evil genie thrown into the mix. There’s also actual nudity this time around, including one scene that feels like it wandered in straight from a softcore porn movie. Then there’s the bizarre sequence in which a couple has sex on the floor of a room that’s apparently open to the public. While they’re busy getting intimate, some random guy walks in and starts watching TV, with neither party noticing the other despite being mere feet apart. Apparently, the Djinn isn’t the only thing in this movie capable of making reality bend to its will.
The previous movie’s plot device of having the Djinn collect 1,001 souls to keep him occupied for the first two acts has been thrown out the window. Instead, Connery spends most of the movie wandering from one location on campus to another in search of Diana. It’s hardly the largest university in the world, yet she somehow manages to evade him for a good third of the runtime.
The key ingredient of the Wishmaster movies is, of course, the wishes themselves. The franchise is at its best when the Djinn twists someone’s innocent request into a gruesome nightmare, usually with severe bodily harm thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, Wishmaster 3 comes up woefully short in this department. One woman is set on fire, while another girl’s heart explodes, but neither wish is particularly inventive or impressive from a visual standpoint. It’s a stark contrast to the franchise’s obvious inspiration, A Nightmare on Elm Street. With each installment, Freddy’s dream sequences became increasingly ambitious and imaginative. The Wishmaster franchise, on the other hand, seems determined to go in the opposite direction.
The franchise’s quality has been on a steady downward trajectory, and Wishmaster 3 is the worst entry so far. Aside from the attractive women and gratuitous nudity, there’s precious little here to recommend. And believe me, I really wanted to find something to like about this movie. Unfortunately, wishing for a better sequel doesn’t seem to work in real life.
