The Wishmaster franchise was already a niche carnival ride by the time we got to part three. The first film had Andrew Divoff chewing scenery like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet, hamming it up as the Djinn and making bad puns fun. The second film doubled down on schlock but at least kept the engine sputtering. And then came Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell, a direct-to-video spectacle so limp it feels like the cinematic equivalent of finding out your genie grants wishes in expired coupons and Subway footlongs.
The Plot: A Cursed Mad Lib
You know the drill: some dumb kid rubs the wrong shiny rock, and boom—out comes the Djinn to ruin everyone’s lives with monkey’s paw wishes. This time the unlucky sap is Diana, a college student who manages to release the Djinn while snooping through a professor’s weird trinkets. Because college kids can’t just binge ramen and play Mario Kart like normal—they’ve got to summon eternal damnation in between midterms.
Professor Barash, our resident authority figure, makes the rookie mistake of wishing for “two of the world’s loveliest ladies to love him.” Naturally, instead of a hot tub scene, the ladies rip him apart like he’s a wishbone at Thanksgiving. The Djinn then does his best Mission: Impossible impression by stealing the professor’s face. The problem? He looks less like a respected scholar and more like Jason Connery wondering how fast he can get this paycheck cashed.
From here, it’s just a string of bargain-bin ironic deaths. A secretary wishes for her files to burn, so she bursts into flames. A girl wants to lose weight, so she vomits her organs like she’s auditioning for The Exorcist 5: Jenny Craig’s Revenge. Another guy tells the Djinn to “blow him,” and ends up skewered by a bull statue in what might be cinema’s dumbest dad-joke-turned-death.
And then, because someone in the writer’s room thought it would be cool to mix Christianity with SyFy Channel aesthetics, Diana summons Archangel Michael. He shows up by possessing her boyfriend Greg, because angels apparently respect consent as much as the Djinn respects fine print. Cue awkward holy battles that look like two LARP groups colliding in a college auditorium.
The Djinn: Discount Demon
John Novak replaces Andrew Divoff as the Djinn, and boy, is it noticeable. Divoff delivered his lines with a gleeful, theatrical menace. Novak, on the other hand, delivers them like he’s stuck in traffic and late for his kid’s piano recital. He’s not scary, he’s not funny, and he sure as hell isn’t charismatic. Imagine a middle manager in Hell forced to do a team-building exercise. That’s our villain.
His makeup looks like melted Halloween latex that’s been reheated in a microwave. His voice is less “ancient evil” and more “guy at a convention trying to sound spooky for tips.” When your supernatural villain inspires more pity than dread, you know the evil is truly unseen.
Acting 101: Don’t
A.J. Cook stars as Diana, our heroine. She does her best to look terrified, but her performance has the energy of someone whose cat knocked over the laundry detergent. Tobias Mehler plays Greg, her boyfriend/angel vessel, and he spends most of the runtime with the expression of a man realizing he signed up for the wrong student film.
Jason Connery (yes, Sean Connery’s son) gets to ham it up as Professor Barash/Djinn-in-disguise. The Connery family name might carry weight, but in Wishmaster 3, it’s carrying dead weight. The rest of the cast is cannon fodder with faces you’ll forget before the credits roll, except for the girl who pukes her intestines—she deserves at least a fruit basket for effort.
Deaths: Irony on a Shoestring
One of the supposed selling points of the Wishmaster franchise is its ironic kills. In theory, that’s fun. In practice, in Wishmaster 3, it’s like watching a drunk magician explain how every trick works before botching the punchline.
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“Files to burn”? Guess what, you’re toast.
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“Lose weight”? Prepare to be Jenny-Craig’d to death.
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“Break my heart”? Sure, let me just literally rip that out.
The kills are uninspired, lazily staged, and about as shocking as an expired pop tart. Even Final Destination 2 made bus-related deaths exciting. Here, everything just feels like a grimy knockoff.
Special Effects: Beyond the Budget of Hell
The effects look like they were whipped up in a garage with a glue gun and leftover Silly Putty. CGI wings flap around like they were borrowed from a Windows 95 screensaver. The sword of Michael looks like it was bought at a Renaissance Faire clearance sale. And don’t get me started on the Djinn’s transformations, which resemble early PlayStation cutscenes that didn’t survive Y2K.
Every “scary” moment is either so dark you can’t see anything, or so cheap you wish you couldn’t. When the scariest part of your horror movie is the film grain, something went wrong.
Theology for Dummies
The film tries to sprinkle in Judeo-Christian lore by making the archangel Michael a key player. Instead of feeling epic, it comes across like bad Bibleman fanfiction. Michael, reduced to a frat boy possessed by divine will, dukes it out with the Djinn like they’re auditioning for Mortal Kombat: Youth Pastor Edition. The sword is supposed to be a holy relic, but it looks like a foam prop you’d win at Chuck E. Cheese for 500 tickets.
The climax involves Diana trying to commit suicide (in a college horror film—subtle!) only to gain the ability to wield Michael’s sword. If that sounds profound, don’t worry: the execution is so clumsy it plays like a parody.
The Ending: Hell’s Refund Policy
Eventually, Diana stabs the Djinn with the holy sword, killing him in a showdown so anticlimactic it makes watching paint dry seem riveting. Michael heals her wounds before heading back to Heaven, presumably embarrassed to be associated with this movie. Diana gets to live, her boyfriend is back to normal, and the audience is left to question their life choices.
Final Thoughts: A Wish Denied
Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell is proof that some franchises don’t need sequels—they need mercy killings. Everything that made the original campy fun—Divoff’s performance, creative gore, witty puns—is stripped away, leaving us with an anemic direct-to-video slog that confuses boredom for suspense and cheap irony for clever horror.
It’s not scary. It’s not funny. It’s not even bad in an entertaining way. It’s just limp, like a genie’s lamp that’s been rubbed one too many times.
