The phrase “so bad it’s good” has become overused and I try to avoid it, but it absolutely applies in this case. Wish Upon is comedic gold. That is somewhat problematic because it’s a horror film, but this thing is just too damn funny. I went into this expecting to hate it because of both its tired be-carful-what-you-wish-for premise and its PG-13, pre-teen horror bullshit. But no. I had a blast. I laughed out loud early and often during this film. At first, my laughter drew some strange looks from the other people in the theater. But, by the end, everyone laughed at the unmitigated disaster projected on the screen. If you stood outside the theater and just listened to the audience, you would think that we were watching a revival screening of Airplane instead of a horror movie. It’s that bad. And it’s fantastic.
The plot is something that has been done a million times. A girl finds a music box that grants wishes (seven in this case), but there is a catch! The wishes come true with surprising consequences and somebody has to die for every wish that is granted. That manages to rip off The Monkey’s Paw, The Box, and Wishmaster in a coup of derivative laziness. Since there isn’t really an antagonist, the deaths must all occur through sheer clumsiness and stupidity. Therefore, it’s also a Final Destination ripoff. I’m not going to bother with any more of the plot because we’ve all seen this shit before and know what’s going to happen.
Let’s look at the wishes and the dumbass making them. First, this girl continues making wishes even after she realizes that they are having horrible consequences. Somebody points out that people are dying for her petty bullshit and she responds “I know and I said I’m sorry!” and then proceeds to wish to be the most popular girl in school. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. Eventually, she oddly chains the thing up and sticks it in an air duct. Why she does that, I have no idea since it can’t attack you. It doesn’t matter, though, because she just takes it back out to make more wishes. She tries to burn it at one point and that doesn’t work, so, fuck it, she keeps making wishes. The most common comment in the theater was “bitch, stop using the fucking thing!”. Normally, I get annoyed when people talk at the movies, but I wasn’t even mad because I also pondered why this bitch kept using the fucking thing. The movie never answered the question.
The wishes are just great. She wishes for the kind of vapid shit that you would expect a teenager to wish for, but each has an unintentionally hilarious element that just goes that little bit extra. Like when she wishes for the bully girl to rot and the bully’s friends, upon seeing her wasting away like old fruit with frostbite, immediately take out their phones to take pictures for Instagram. Or when she wishes to inherit money from her rich uncle (who she just unintentionally killed with a wish). She immediately moves into her uncle’s ultra-modern mansion (which totally looks like it’s in a rural midwestern town and not southern California) and the movie halts for a shopping montage of her and her friends trying on clothes and buying purses. This sequence goes on for what seems like forever while I just sat there baffled. My personal favorite is when she wishes for her dumpster-diving dad (played by Ryan Phillippe, who needs a better agent) to stop being such an embarrassment. He immediately appears clean-shaven, wearing clothes cobbled together from GQ advice columns and spends all his time playing smooth jazz saxophone while her basic bitch friends stare at him and drool like his dick was crafted from Ugg boots and pumpkin spice lattes. It’s like a parody that doesn’t know it’s a parody, like if the people that made Naked Gun were trying to make a serious police film.
The death scenes could only be improved by the addition of the Three Stooges theme song. An old man slipping and hitting his head on a bathtub has never been funnier, especially when he tries to get up and inexplicably smacks his face on the faucet. Another woman dies because she doesn’t realize that she shouldn’t put her pony tail in a garbage disposal. But my favorite is the guy who is holding a ladder for his friend while he cuts tree branches with a chainsaw. I immediately laughed like a maniac when I saw the chainsaw, but then thought that the movie couldn’t possibly be that obvious. But nope, it goes exactly how you think it’s going to go. Thank you, movie, for making zero attempt to be clever. My night was better for it.
I absolutely recommend this movie. I get annoyed when people say that Sharknado and other SyFy channel movies are the worst films ever. No, they aren’t. They aren’t sincere in their awfulness. They are designed to be silly so that they will trend on Twitter or whatever. Wish Upon is sincere in its badness. It is a genuine, unintentional failure. Everyone involved seems to be really trying to make a good horror movie, and their catastrophic ineptitude created something even better. This won’t be in my 5 worst movies of the year list in January because it is so goddam fun. So grab some beers and some friends and enjoy watching careers implode before your very eyes with the dumbfuck majesty that is Wish Upon.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wish_Upon#/media/File:Wish_upon_ver2.jpg
