Wishcraft (2002)
"Be careful what you wish for"
Plot
A nerdy teenager receives a mysterious totem through the post with a note which says that he has been granted three wishes. He doesn't believe it but tries it anyway, asking the totem to make his dream girl ask him out to the prom. Surprising she does, much to the annoyance of her current boyfriend. But as he uses his wishes, teenagers on the college campus start to be brutally murdered. Is there a connection between the two?
Review
Well obviously there is a connection between the two otherwise we wouldn't have a film. But the connection is so flimsy that the whole film just dissolves into a messy heap when it is finally revealed. This is a real shame as up until the finale, Wishcraft is a surprisingly competent Noughties slasher flick which has some good things going for it. But in an era where the slasher film had been enjoying a revival and then a sharp decline thanks to big budget teen slashers like Scream and a then saturated with a steady stream of lesser quality copycats that had been released to DVD, Wishcraft does little to distinguish itself from the rest of the field.
Well, aside from the mystery totem. It is not a shiny genie's lamp. It is not a creepy monkey's paw. It is an enchanted bull's, uh, appendage. Brett uses his first wish not to solve world hunger or something grandiose but ensure the most popular cheerleader in school, Samantha, agrees to go to an upcoming school dance with him. It’s all very rom-rom lite. But the very second this wish is granted, the film fires up the slasher tropes. And then for the remainder of the running time, Wishcraft straddles the lines between the two genres rather bizarrely. Brett’s classmates start getting brutally murdered by a psycho in a cloak and a skull mask. Now, if you are watching this, the first thing your brain does is connect the dots? The magical bull part must have summoned the killer. But Brett doesn't make that connection. I mean, he is so thrilled to be living in a teen romance that he completely ignores the Grim Reaper-esque campus massacre happening right in his periphery. There must be a price for the magic. That's just standard horror rules. And this is where Wishcraft acts as such an anomaly in the teen horror landscape. Usually, the slasher plot dictates the entire reality of the film, everything revolving around the killer. The characters react to the killer. They investigate the murders. They fight to survive. The horror is the sun, and the characters orbit it. But not here. Here, the murders are just set dressing. They are literal background noise to a standard teen comedy about a nerd getting the girl, which honestly makes me wonder if Brett is the villain of the film. Everything else seems to be a minor inconvenience to him. Instead of waiting for the mean girl to get her comeuppance, the aggressive, toxic male characters are the ones catching the sharp end of the slasher's axe here, which does make for a bit of a nice change.
In a moment of jealousy, Brett’s friend, Howie, straight up steals the totem from him and tries to use the magic for himself. But the magic completely flat out fails. It just ignores him, which establishes a selective, almost sentient logic to this film universe. Why does the universe bend over backward to rewrite reality for Brett, giving him mind control powers over a cheerleader while leaving his friend with absolutely nothing? It deepens the mystery of the totem, even if Brett is too self-absorbed to notice it. He's just wandering the halls with intense tunnel vision. Kids are staring at him, whispering about how he managed to date Samantha, and he is so drunk on the social validation that he barely registers the fact that those same kids are being picked off one by one.
So, if Brett is entirely too distracted to care about the horror movie happening around him, we must look at the actual murders he's ignoring. A couple of the death scenes are silly including death by bowling ball and Viking axe but credit due for originality. In the wrong hands, these kill scenes could have come off as campy and cheesy but they're not. Even though one unlucky character gets their head smashed in with a bowling ball, the scene isn't played for laughs and it's all the better for it. Everything is played straight too so there's none of the self-aware nonsense that lesser talented script writers had trouble in replicating from Kevin Williamson's brilliant script for Scream. Sometimes keeping everything serious and resisting the urge to throw in some jokes at the expense of more popular films is worth it.
Wishcraft does at least look reasonably well budgeted. The production values are sharp, the film looks crisp and there's good quality with picture and sound. Helping matters is a decent pace which means that the film never outstays its welcome, though it runs a little longer than usual slashers. But I was incredibly frustrated with Brett’s apathy. For the plot to move forward, a protagonist needs to be active, but Brett is not motivated to investigate who sent him the totem, and he has zero curiosity about the identity of the serial killer because he already has what he wants, the cheerleader. And because the protagonist isn't driving the mystery, the narrative burden of the investigation falls entirely on the local police, specifically a local homicide detective played by rock legend Meat Loaf, who's credited here under his real name, Michael Aday. It amplifies the surreal fever dream energy of the whole project. You have a teen rom com, a brutal slasher, and suddenly the singer of Bat Out of Hell is standing at a crime scene. Whilst his appearance does take you out of the film for a moment, it’s clear that his character is too incompetent to solve the crimes as well. So, this exposes the giant vacuum at the centre of the plot: the hero is ignoring it, and the detective is incapable of solving it.
The final third is where the film loses everything and goes totally off the rails as the two seemingly separate plots finally join. The reveal of the killer is just a mind numbingly bland moment and you'll never expect such a person to be the culprit. The connection between the magical totem and the campus murders in Wishcraft is structurally non-existent and the killer's unmasking doesn’t work because the motive relies on information the film never bothered to show us. A satisfying mystery requires narrative trust. When you write a killer reveal, the motive must tie the events of the film together in a way that makes the audience say, "Ah, I should have seen that." But there is no emotional or thematic logic tying the killer's grievance to Brett's romantic journey. If the rom-com storyline ignores the slasher storyline for eighty minutes, you can't suddenly plant the seeds for a motive in the final act. You need to do some heavy lifting to build that bridge during the first and second acts.
At least the film contains strong performances from its likeable cast to keep it going. Michael Weston, (who graduated from previous teen horror Cherry Falls to become the main character this time) as the nerdy teenager Brett, does alright in the lead role and he's ably supported by Alexandra Holden as the school beauty he uses his wish upon. The two actually have a decent chemistry together so it's not that hard to stomach the two of them falling in love and there's some humour and spark between them.
Final Verdict
Wishcraft doesn't exactly break any new ground in slasher film lore, nor does it trample the genre in the process by lazily copying its predecessors. It's a steady film if you like conveyer belt Noughties teen horror, with some likeable leads and reasonable kills, with director Richard Wenk showing some decent promise for future horrors.
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Wishcraft Director(s): Danny Graves, Richard Wenk Writer(s): Larry Katz Actor(s): Michael Weston, Alexandra Holden, Austin Pendleton, A.J. Buckley, Huntley Ritter, Gregory Cooke, Meat Loaf, Charlie Talbert Duration: 102 mins |  |
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