Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell (2001)

As a drawback to wishing for something as great as Wishmaster 2, I also had to sit through its Yin Yang counterpart – Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell. Or more realistically – Beyond the Gates of Total Horseshit.

Director: Chris Angel

Starring: Jason Connery, A.J. Cook

IMDb

I mean this is just total garbage. What the hell happened? It’s not like we were asking for much; just more goofy jokes and retarded genie scenes. But this movie couldn’t even give us that. What it does give us is a black hole of hope for humanity from which it will be impossible to return. Those with weak stomachs are advised to turn back now – this is going to be painful!

We start off this one with a fitting metaphor for the ensuing 85 minutes we’re about to be tortured with:

If you're hoping to get some kind of explanation for this, don't waste your time. It's just the typical horror movie crap - "hey, we can't think of a backstory or any real character traits for our lead!" "Just throw in a horrible car accident story!"

Apparently this is a flashback from our main character, Bland White Girl. She's a part of a hit reality show, Attractive People on Rooftops, along with her dumb looking boyfriend.

I love hanging out on rooftops almost as much as I love killing my career by appearing in movies like this.

What's her personality like, you ask? Well, she's bland, a girl, and her British college professor wants to fuck her. Magical, isn't it?

I made a joke about the teacher wanting to fuck her, then literally a few scenes later he's trying to get her to have dinner with him. What a total scumbag loser he is.

If you’re wondering if this is going to have anywhere near the level of schlocky goodness as the other two – well, let me just put it like this: Andrew Divoff, who played the genie in the first two, is nowhere to be found. I’m imagining the scenario where he got the script for this one: “No one craps out coins or fucks themselves in the ass Yoga style in this movie? Please, I have better things to do.” Instead, the genie takes the body of the douchebag English college professor.

Not before enacting his greatest fantasy though – two beautiful women, topless, scratching his eyes out:

I wonder what these girls' diaries look like. "Well, my time in Hollywood trying to become an actor is kind of rough. I got a part in a movie, then it turned out the only thing I had to do was get naked, make out with some middle aged guy and then kill him. I wanted some character with depth and subtlety, but I guess this is the only role I'm fit to play. Sigh. I miss the days when women were stereotyped as the damsel in distress in horror films instead of ... whatever this is."

If you ever wanted Wishmaster themed porn, well, this is the closest you’d get. Not to mention the genie’s voice is soaked in echo and reverb like he’s speaking from the bottom of a laundry chute. Which, to be fair, is the only place you’d find this movie, so I guess it fits.

The genie takes over the professor’s body and goes to find Bland White Girl, because she summoned him I guess. Meanwhile we get two jackasses getting ready to screw. The girl has a very typical way of surprising her boyfriend: jumping out from the shadows while wearing a giant bull’s head mask.

Yeah, I’ve done that a lot too.

Then they start having sex while porto-potty-ready alt rock music plays in the background. It’s a mercifully short scene, but even so – this is just as bad as the fucking Hitcher remake or fucking Bad Kids Go to Hell; just the bottom of the barrel. Throw in the following scene where of course we need to see every step of this girl getting dressed:

I can picture this scene being rehearsed in my mind: "Uh, Mr. Director, don't you think we could just skip all of this and go directly to her being dressed? Wouldn't the audience be able to figure out that was what happened?" "NO! We have to show this!"

She runs into Professor English Fuckwit, who turns her down, as he’s only into bland girls with no personality and blond hair. What a shame. Now she’s all dressed up with nowhere to go on the weekend – Friday nights spent in the dorm after being rejected by a 40-year-old college professor who’s actually a thousand-year-old genie were always the lowlights of college.

Bland White Girl is too busy talking about her equally bland boyfriend with the other chick. Because, you know, all girls really talk about by themselves is boys and love. To be fair, though, Bland White Girl does somehow discover all about the genie and what he’s done to the professor a few scenes later. Her boyfriend shows up at her dorm and she asks if he loves her. He says he’s come to ask the same question: “DO I LOVE YOU?” I dunno. Look deep in the pools of reflection at the moonlit garden of the sacred talisman and you may find the answer to this deep Zen question.

This is the only place you can get the answers you seek.

She blabbers about the genie and he doesn’t believe her. He’s more concerned about whether or not they love each other. Genies are going to destroy the world! Let’s talk about our relationship. Makes a lot of sense to me. I guess they are about the same level of seriousness in this movie – the whole genie plot really is just kind of swept under the rug here, and never explained all that well. The other two movies had too much plot, this one has too little. Can’t there ever be a happy medium?

The answer is in the crystal ball:

Huh. Well, OK then.

The genie is trying to figure out information about Bland White Girl while this is going on, going to the school’s file clerk or something and asking about her. The file clerk wishes all the files would go up in flames – I think she’s related to this guy:

Anyway, I guess the genie was drunk, because the lady ends up bursting into flames! Human combustion is so wacky. You can just never predict what’s gonna happen! Ha ha ha … why did I ever think it was a good idea to watch this movie?

So we get some really dull scenes of Bland White Girl and her dumbass boyfriend trying to convince everyone the genie is real. They all think she’s crazy as expected. Why bother having anything compelling or interesting in your movie when you can just do the same clichés as everyone else? Snore.

I WILL EAT YOU, RAGGGRRRHHHRAAAGGG!!!

There’s also another scene with that slutty girl hitting on the genie/professor. She says she likes her men older because all the boys in school are dumb or something – I so love how every female character in this movie is written to be single-mindedly obsessed with boys and sex and nothing else. Give the first two Wishmasters credit; they were dumb, but at least they didn’t just phone it in with lame crap like this.

We then get a confrontation between Bland White Girl, her boyfriend and the genie in a church. The genie kidnaps this one girl and somehow, I think, plays on her wish to be skinnier by giving her a magic liposuction:

Yeah, not only do we get yet another horrible female stereotype - they only want to be skinny and beautiful! Ugh - but also a flat out disgusting, nasty, unpleasant death scene like this. This isn't fun at all. Fuck this movie and fuck this scene in particular.

What’s up with the lame death scenes? These aren’t entertaining at all. What happened to the goofy over the top gore-fest deaths from the last two movies? I also love how Bland White Girl actually has to think about saving Anorexia Girl. I guess the logic is that if she makes three wishes, the genie will be able to destroy the Earth – same thing as the last film. But seeing as she hasn’t done any wishes yet, why not use one to save her friend? I guess it’s a tough decision, if you’re a terrible human being.

Then the genie is about to kill her boyfriend, when she wishes to invoke the spirit of the Archangel Michael to help her. How did she know this would work? The movie doesn’t even know. To distract you, we get the Archangel Michael possessing the body of the boyfriend. He speaks in a goofy deep voice that doesn’t in any way fit with the boyfriend’s rather wimpy look:

I will kill you with the rage of a thousand flannel shirts and downloaded Linkin Park albums!

It’s pretty much hilarious for all the wrong reasons. It’s also the only part of this whole goddamn movie that is actually enjoyable. The other ones were a laugh a minute; this one has goofy over dramatic voices like you’d expect a father telling his kids a bedtime story would use. Sad, what these movies have come to.

So we get a ridiculous fight scene between the genie and Michael the Archangel, and it’s about as lame as you’d think – why this movie thinks it can pull off a serious epic fight scene is beyond me. I’m just amazed any of these actors stayed on set the whole time without bursting out laughing. Or falling asleep, for that matter.

The genie gets away and goes to find one of the other girls. For some reason her wish involves being eaten by mice?

Fuck it, I don’t know – this movie wasn’t trying, so why should I bother trying to understand it? This face is all you need to know about this scene:

This guy is the worst genie ever!

During another fight scene, Michael cuts off the genie’s arm – it’s just a flesh wound, though.

Give the movie credit, though – they shoehorn in an action-movie style car chase next, taking up a couple minutes of runtime for no reason other than the movie’s sheer desperation to keep the audience awake. It’s not working.

They have a final showdown on the rooftop. Bland White Girl whips out a Deus Ex Machina if I’ve ever seen one – the genie can’t fulfill its prophecy if she dies, since she was the one who summoned him. So she tries to jump off the roof. The genie catches her, though, and tries to pull her back up. She decides the best way to respond to this situation is to stab the genie through the chest with a sword:

So, awesome! She doesn’t have to fall anymore and the day is saved! Even though the genie has proved before that being physically wounded doesn’t kill him – even just a scene or two ago. So that doesn’t make sense. But at least she doesn’t have to fall to her almost certain death or horrible injury now!

… whoops. And she’s spending the next year and a half in a full body cast. Except she doesn’t, because somehow she’s OK and Michael the Archangel turns back into her bland boyfriend.

So I guess they live happily ever after as the blandest, least interesting couple ever. At least they have that awesome story about how a genie killed all their friends though! That’s always a real crowd pleaser at parties. They didn’t even bother showing everyone killed by the genie coming back to life in this one. I guess they’re all still dead and the college will shut down after a scandal where one of the professors murdered everyone. Then again, if Penn State can survive a sexual abuse scandal, I'm sure this place will be A-OK.

This is crap. The only thing the boredom in this movie accomplishes is numbing your mind from the constant blatant misogyny on display - disgusting really. I’m amazed the director wasn’t told mid-production to pack up his shit and go home. Maybe he had some kind of infernal pact with a genie himself. He wished for the ability to make a movie, but the downside was, the movie he made wasn’t a good one!

The genie then further punished him by forcing him to make Wishmaster 4. If you wish to see me review that horrible movie too, well, let me grant your wish and take you four years back in time…

Click the picture!

The only downside is, now you’re stuck in 2010 forever and have to live out life from then on! Mwuhahaha! Okay, I’m done now. The movie has clearly sucked all the funny out of me. Until next week!

Images copyright of their original owners.

Review: Life of Brian (1979)

Director: Terry Jones

Starring: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam

Website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079470/

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?"

-Reg

British humor is its own institution. It’s just about one of the most trademarked, idiosyncratic styles of comedy out there, love it or hate it. And one can’t even talk about British humor in the modern day without referencing at least once or twice the comedic bastion known as Monty Python. What better way to exemplify everything that is great about this style than by reviewing one of the early classics, Life of Brian? I don’t know, so…I guess we’ll just do this the way I always do it.

This movie is hilarious because it stares right at Jesus Christ for like, a second before veering the camera off to the side to focus on a regular average Joe who isn’t interesting in the least by himself. Life of Brian works because it flaunts itself as sarcastically as possible, as often as possible. Right from the opening where the three astronomers come in and bless the baby who they think is their savior, the movie doesn’t let up. Every second bombards you with another joke and that is how it always should be – fast paced with jokes crammed into every orifice. Then you get this completely goofy song sequence while the credits roll over a cartoon side-scrolling adventure, informing us that Brian, that kid who they mistakenly thought was Jesus, is ‘not a woman.’ That’s important to know!

The movie is basically a case of mistaken identity, even though almost everyone in this movie is played in traditional Python format by one of the main ‘Python’ guys. Graham Chapman is the lead as Brian, a guy born on the same day as Jesus Christ. After falling in love with a hot rebel chick named Judith Iscariot, Brian joins the Peoples’ Front of Judea and eventually gets himself into trouble when people mistake his on-the-spot ramblings for religious prophesying…what ensues does not end well for poor Brian.

A lot of this movie is made up of really cutting satire against religion, mostly attacking the collective hive-mind worship mentality of religious followers at times and the willingness to suspend logic in the face of something supposedly divine. Exemplifying the movie’s wayward distancing from the orthodox religious norm is, again, the fact that it starts off at Jesus’ sermon at the rock, only to pay as little attention to Jesus himself as possible. It focuses more on the idiots at the back bickering about whose nose is big and whose isn’t. That’s pretty damn funny, and even moreso if it ruffled some religious feathers here and there upon its release.

The whole core of the film’s comedy is brought to the forefront when Brian finally gets mistaken for a prophet after escaping capture. He tries to blend in with the various street prophets by standing up and shouting random nonsense…except people start to believe his nonsense and take it so seriously that he becomes hailed as a real prophet. A gourd that he hands to a guy beside him becomes hailed as a sacred object, as does a sandal that he drops – illustrating the silliness behind deification of objects. It’s all very biting satire. Like another scene where he talks to his GIGANTIC league of followers and gets them all to repeat “We are individuals” as a giant chorus – like that’s not hypocritical.

It’s practically diabolical with how ridiculous and over the top it is. It’s funny and witty as hell, all the time. Being Monty Python, you’ll occasionally get a really out-there gag like the part where Brian gets flown into outer space by two aliens with eyeballs not attached to their heads, before being returned to Earth like nothing ever happened. But also with that, you get some jokes that just don’t work. I didn’t really find the continuous gag with Pilate’s lisping and “Biggus Dickus” so much funny as just irritating as hell. And the same for that retarded gag about the merchant trying to haggle with Brian – sometimes, a joke goes on too long and just…loses every trace of its original humor. But these jokes never even had that, so I guess that’s a bit of a moot point for them, isn’t it?

So it’s a bit hit-or-miss. When it’s funny, it’s hilarious, but there are some things that just…irk me. The only other Monty Python I’ve seen is Holy Grail, and this one is significantly not as good as that one was. Life of Brian has its moments, and it’s very much worth seeing if you like comedy, but it’s not quiiiiiite as good as I expected…but still, go watch it. I'd watch it again, and that's all that counts.