Diana Collins (A.J. Cook - Ripper, Final Destination 2) frequently wakes up in a cold sweat after having dreamt of the death of her parents in a car crash that she feels she was the cause of. She sat in the back seat and argued with her parents, her father distracted from the road long enough not to see an overturned truck in the way. Diana’s father got her away from the wreckage, but when he went back to help her mother, the car exploded and killed both of them. Her boyfriend Greg constantly assures her that it wasn’t her fault and frequently tries to get her to seek counselling to deal with it, but she always refuses. Diana is the top student in her mythology class where she studies with Greg, her best friend Katie, and Katie’s boyfriend Billy. Their teacher, Professor Barash (Jason Connery – son of Sean!) is very impressed with Diana’s knowledge and hard work, and invites her to help him catalogue new items that have just been delivered to the college’s museum. Diana finds the museum empty when she arrives, so deciding to poke around the new items anyway finds an extremely ornate box. Studying it closely and not being able to make head nor tale of it, she starts to tire but when she squints at the box again, she sees a secret button is revealed like some sort of stereogram picture or something. She presses the button, thus solving the puzzle of the box and unleashing the diabolical Pinhead and the Cenobites.

Sorry wrong movie. A secret compartment in the box is opened and she finds inside a mysterious red jewel, which she decides to rub with a rag despite it being perfectly clean (all people who saw the first two movie groan in unison) and Barash shows up soon after. He’s very impressed with her finding and comes on to her a little, but she has to go meet Greg and so the professor is left dejected and she leaves. He’s not alone for long though, as an evil Djiin (John Novak) slides into the scene and scares the crap out of him, “oh God” he says in shock, “not even close” is the Djiin’s wince-inducing reply. The Djiin is an evil demon that grants wishes, only twisting them horribly, but he must find the person who released him and grant them three wishes, only then will he be able to unleash the full evil of the Djiin across the world. Diana released him but Barash doesn’t know where she went, so instead the Djiin decides to grant the professor a wish. The Djiin tries to appeal to the Professor’s loneliness and when that fails, the Djiin threatens to reveal to the world that he once raped one of his students. Barash gives in and wishes for the two women that he would find the most beautiful in all of the world to be in love with him, and to be there at that very moment. The two women appear and start to ravish him, before their eyes turn red and they slash him to death with nasty pointy fingers. The Djiin takes Barash’s face and uses it to take on his appearance, and starts wrecking havoc trying to get to Diana, and forcing her to use her three wishes. Her friends don’t believe her when she realises what she has unleashed onto the college campus, thinking that she’s having some sort of episode related to her other troubles. The Djiin edges ever closer and forced to first end the suffering of a fellow student with one wish, Diana then wishes for the Archangel Michael to come and help her. Michael enters the body of her boyfriend Greg and with the Sword of Justice in hand, they prepare to try and destroy this evil demon.

Ugh, this f**king movie! This film should be forever held up as the perfect example of how NOT to do a sequel. I’m a pretty big fan of the first two films in this series - the stories and scripts were strong and clever, the diabolical way the Djiin would twist people’s wishes to do very evil things to people were immensely enjoyable. Andrew Divoff also brought a lot of charisma and creepy charm to his role, making him stand out a mile from the rest of formulaic horror villains. Heck, they even managed a great sequel that closely followed the laws established by the first film, that the Djiin needed to grant wishes to gain power, and could do very little without greedy, vulnerable people to make wishes for him. The fact that Wishmaster 2 got everything right just makes the third entry all the more frustrating. Gone is the charismatic and creepy Divoff, gone are the clever twists on people’s wishes (people just wish for something, and then die in as unoriginal a manner as possible), everything that made the first two movies fun and different is totally lost here. The cast is incredibly weak, John Novak provides a dull typical camp villain voice with a lot of vocal effects put over the top of it (though his experience wish crappy cartoons like G.I. Joe might have something to do with this) and the Djiin costume is a good big cheaper and doesn’t even get used very much. It couldn’t be more obvious that Jason Connery hasn’t inherited much in the way of acting skills or charisma from his dad either, he’s flat, boring, and incredibly wimpy – yet they want us to think he’s the oh so scary villain for most of the movie? Puh-lease! Some of the acting from the supporting cast is scarier than this goof. The lead character Diana is played by A.J. Cook and between starring in this and the worst slasher movie ever Ripper, she is fast becoming my pretty nemesis. The tight pants she wore proved far more compelling than her performance ever did, though the saddest thing is she’s probably the best of the idiotic “like, oh my god” late-teen cast, two of whom also starred in Ripper. They are utterly dire and in the majority of cases were obviously hired for their looks well above their acting ability, they’re a bunch of dim-witted MTV VJs in the making.

However the poor ability of the cast pales in comparison to the horrendous writing perpetrated by Alex Wright – not a German pro-wrestler, but an absolute hack of a writer. He is the man responsible for disregarding the rules of the Djiin set up by the other two films, the woefully boring and uninspired death scenes, and the Archangel Michael? The SWORD OF JUSTICE? WHAAAAAAAAT?! The ‘Sword of Justice’ example is a perfect example of just how little clue this guy had. Sure, they had a fairly small budget, but the way the Djiin uses people’s wishes to kill them was just lazy, there was no thought, no wry sense of humour, he just killed them and in the process showed that Wright had only the vaguest of understanding of the first two films, if he’d even bothered to watch them! Even more irritating is that he couldn’t even get the horror clichés right! Diana is haunted by the death of her parents, blaming herself, so surely the Djiin uses this against her and tries to tempt her to use a wish to bring her mom and pop back right? *BUUUUUZZZZZT*, WRONG! Another ridiculous piece of writing was that the Archangel Michael takes over Greg’s body, but he’s a total wuss! He gets beaten up, and runs away, all he brings is the crappy Sword of Justice which he can’t even use to kill the Djiin, only Diana can, why even bother coming? Did Wright get his Wishmaster 3 script mixed up with one he was writing for Deathstalker 5? Did he actually write the pages in the correct order? Well according to IMDb he’s not written anything since, so thank heaven for small mercies.

An utterly abysmal, badly made, mindless, wretched excuse for entertainment and a terrible crime against the first two films in the series. Bad actors, a small budget, and absolute hacks working behind the scenes have doomed this film, and possibly the whole franchise, to bad movie hell. The Sword of Justice? Well here’s the GIL OF ENLIGHTENMENT.