The Wisher (2002)

"Terror is just one wish away..."

Plot

Mary suffers from constant nightmares and bouts of sleep walking. Her parents blame the horror films that she watches frequently. After watching the latest horror film, The Wisher, Mary begins to see the title character and thinks that he's stalking her. Whenever she wishes for something to happen, it does but in gory fashion. What is happening to her? Is she seeing things? Or has the Wisher come to life?

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I hope the makers of The Wishmaster are taking notes because this borders a little on plagiarism. Or maybe not because The Wisher is such a monotonous and generic slasher that it's so hard to remember what happened literally only a few hours since I finished watching it, that I guess anyone who could have been involved in a potential lawsuit has totally forgotten it too. A below-average addition to the straight-to-video glut of horror films in the 2000s, The Wisher only has me posing one ultimate wish - I wish I'd never wasted ninety-minutes of my life on this that I can't get back.

For a start, it's completely unoriginal and covers nothing new that countless other slasher films have done in the past. Borrowing heavily from The Wishmaster, Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street amongst others, there's little material here that you won't have seen before and seen done better. The film-within-a-film plot serves it's purpose (there's no way that as a horror movie as bad as it is would rake in $100 million as the film states!) and even throws in a few not-too-subtle messages to the left-wing radicals who believe that kids take horror films too seriously. It even gets in a few jabs at other horror films, most notably Halloween: Resurrection. Although quite how anyone involved here can criticise or take a pot shot at the far superior Halloween franchise remains to be seen. Ironically, the film-within-a-film seems far more interesting than what we get here. The Wisher limps around from generic set piece to the next for the majority of its running time. The killer has the ability to be in a hundred places at once and does the obligatory boogieman skits, playing on the "is he real or not?" narrative but ultimately making little sense in the overall scheme of things once the film has reached its Scooby Doo-like conclusion.

This is all a shame because The Wisher at least shows off something of a budget. It looks reasonable and there are some nice effects splattered around. So clearly there was cash floating around somewhere - didn't anyone think to invest it into the script or hire some decent actors? Lots of coincidences and conveniences in the plot allow for plenty of on-screen shenanigans at appropriate times but they don't make any logical sense. The script is messy and confusing, not really sure itself of whether the title character is real or not. Even the finale is a complete cop-out where Mary finds out that the only way to stop the Wisher is to download a copy of the film illegally and watch the ending to see how he is defeated. I'd say that's pretty good advice if you're planning on watching this at any point - skip forward an hour and start from there.

The Wisher himself looks pretty pathetic as a slasher villain. He's a cross between Freddy Kruger and the Creeper from Jeepers Creepers, only without knives (shards of glass instead) and the lovable cowboy hat that the Creeper wore so brilliantly. He's given little in the way of story and comes off as a weak threat at best. Shockingly, he doesn't kill that many people (total kill count ends up as two) so don't go into this one expecting a body count of titanic proportions. More people die in random episodes of The X-Files or Star Trek than this. The kills are rather lame and bloodless when they happen but they're too few and far between to make any difference to the film. We get another swimming pool death scene where someone goes off swimming on their own at some bizarre time of the night. Who does this in real life? Who goes to an empty pool at silly hours of the night for a swim on their own? Hasn't anyone heard of health and safety laws? They wouldn't allow sole swimming here in the UK - there'd be about twenty lifeguards standing around the pool just in case anything happened.

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Final Verdict

The Wisher can sit and rot on the video store shelf next to the likes of Final Scream and Do You Wanna Know a Secret? It's about the only place I'd be glad to see it ever again. A derivative slasher which offers nothing and delivers nothing except a goth-looking guy with glass in his hands – its only a matter of time before he uses it on his own wrists!

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The Wisher Director(s): Gavin Wilding Writer(s): Ellen Cook (screenplay) Actor(s): Ron Silver, Liane Balaban, Drew Lachey, Siri Baruc, Billy Morton, Wendy Anderson, Iain MacLean, Ariel Bastian Duration: 90 mins