Review

  • At Edinburgh's Dead by Dawn horror festival, I had the dubious pleasure of watching Wishcraft, in which a 20-something `teen' cast get killed by some nasty demon-looking creature, after one receives a mysterious bulls penis in the post which grants wishes. Yup, it's the old teen slasher at it again, although in it's defence, Wishcraft does feature a couple of daftly inventive deaths, such as the bowling ball sequence. Sadly, it gets far too bogged down in the teen angst angle, as our geeky `hero' Brett (Michael Weston) wishes for the most beautiful blonde in the school be his girlfriend. Having introduced the killer, the film then completely forgets about it for about half an hour, & none of the characters seem even remotely aware or interested that a killer is on the prowl. There's the suggestion that this is some evil, demonic entity at work, but this angle is completely fluffed & thrown away in favour of convention. Many recent slashers have tried to gain kudos by having genre favourites appearing, such as Jeffrey Combs in I Still Know., or Robert Englund in Urban Legend. Here, we get Poltergeists' Zelda Rubinstein making a cameo as a coroner. Meat Loaf also turns up as a policeman, but that's about as much fun as you're likely to get. I watched this film at around 6 o'clock in the morning, having been up constantly watching movies since half past nine the day before. The best thing I can say about it is that it managaed to keep me awake.