First appearance: Wishmaster (1997)
In ancient Persia, a whole lot of nastiness explodes. Turns out the Djinn is trying to kill a bunch of people in order to let his people back into our reality. A wizard traps him in a fire opal which is in turn entombed in a statue. Fast forward to 1997 Robert England and his assistant, Ted Raimi, are accepting delivery of this statute for Mr. England's museum or something. Turns out one of the dock workers is a drunk. Through his drunkenness the statute crushes Ted and breaks open releasing the Djinn Djewel, thus initiating a series of events leading to the release of the Djinn! Can he be stopped before he manages to do what ever it is he's gotta do to release the rest of he people into our dimension! You wish there was a way to stop him!
A surprisingly fun movie featuring a bunch of horror movie cameos, some pretty cool deaths and a monster with a ridiculous weakness! I think the Djinn is my favourite of the wish-based monsters that showed up in the 80s-90s, this includes The Leprechaun, to a certain extent the Cenobites and the Gate II version of the little minion things. They changed the look of the Djinn in the sequel but I didn't like it as much as this armoured version of the guy. I was also surprised to learn that there were actually four Wishmaster movies. Since Andrew Divoff is not the Djinn in those I don't think there's anything to recommend anyone see either of them. Especially if the pattern of how to defeat the Wishmaster in the first two flicks is any indication of how the series continues.
Also there seems to be some debate as to if Chriss "The MindFreak"Angel had anything to do with directing the third one, or if it was just a typo since the director of the fourth one was Chris "I'm not Chriss 'The MindFreak' Angel" Angel, who was not a Los Vegas magician. Co-incidence? MINDFREAK
If you're too young to remember going to video stores you may not have seen this beauty so here's the trailer:
