“Here’s a review I wrote for a library newsletter. Enjoy!
Let’s say I told you that your library card is a wish-granting device. Not in a silly, metaphorical sense, not in a a book can let you travel anywhere kind of way.
I mean your library card can literally grant wishes.
You hold it up, you make a wish, and it comes true. For three weeks. Then the wish has to be returned. Hey, don’t complain. Seconds ago you had NO wishes, so limited-time wishes is a big upgrade.
Okay, so I tell you all this, and what’s your move?
My advice would be to make a low-stakes wish, test it out.
So, you hold up your library card, and you wish for a contemporary, clever horror movie with a few good twists.
What your library card gives you is a little movie called Wish Upon.
~
You and I both know that, in horror, things that grant wishes (genies, monkey paws, Wishmasters), give you what you asked for, technically, but there’s always a catch, a twist.
Your wish-granting library card is no different.
If only you’d thought of that whole be careful what you wish for thing BEFORE you moseyed on over to Hoopla and checked out Wish Upon, it would’ve saved us both quite a bit of confusion.
But you just couldn’t help yourself, could you?
Well, we’re in this together now, so let’s quite stalling and accept our fate.
This is Wish Upon.
~
Wish Upon opens with a suburban scene and a woman who takes something out to the garbage, then, apparently, ends her own life. This scene does have a reason for existing. Sort of. It’s complicated. I kind of regret bringing it up, and if I feel like the first scene of Wish Upon is a clumsy start to this summary, I have to assume the filmmakers regret putting this confusing, unnecessary bit at the beginning of their movie.
We fast-forward 10 years and meet our main character, played by Joey King, who I think of as Fake Alexis Bledel, aka Rory from Gilmore Girls. I’ll refer to her character as Rory for the duration of this review because A) I don’t remember her character’s name, and B) Rory deserves this punishment for her bad choices. I’m #TeamDean, and I could understand #TeamJess, but #TeamLogan? Just no.
At this juncture, the movie needs to introduce another character.
Let’s play a game, you and I. I call this game: Worst Way to Introduce Rich, Estranged Uncle August:
A) A picture falls off the mantle, Rory picks it up and asks her dad something like, Are you and Uncle August still not talking? (Pretty bad, but gets the job done)
B) The news is on, Rich Uncle August is being profiled because he did something rich people do, and Rory brings it up with her dad. (Also bad, but serviceable)
C) Rory arrives at her school, Rich Uncle August Academy, and while they stand at the foot of a statue of August, one of her friends says something like, Must be weird to go to a school named after your uncle. (Clumsy, over-the-top, but functional)
D) Rory rides her bike to school, crashes in a driveway, that driveway just so happens to be Rich Uncle August’s driveway, he’s out in front of his house getting the newspaper, and Rory says something like, Sorry for crashing my bike in your driveway, estranged, rich uncle August.
If you picked D, then you must be the screenwriter for Wish Upon, because nobody else would select that option.
It’s almost like the screenwriter made a wish on an enchanted Macbook with a haunted version of Final Draft: I wish for a way to introduce this character that is unique. And that Macbook delivered in traditional, twist-your-wish fashion. Unique? Yes. Sensical? Not in the least.
Anyway, now we’ve got Rich Uncle August, who exists for a reason. We’ll get back to it.
~
Wish Upon also stars Fake Ryan Phillippe, who turned out to be ACTUAL Ryan Phillippe. Hey, Ryan! It’s been a minute!
Ryan plays Rory’s dad. He was once a musician, and he is now a garbage picker and hoarder. Maybe as a hobby, but maybe as a profession? That’s not clear.
Now, I’m not here to bash on someone who’s down on his luck. I myself have done quite a bit of trash pickin’ in my day.
It began when I was a youngster. I had a friend who lived in an apartment complex where we found some true treasures in the garbage. And we found some things that were not true treasures, including an enormous stuffed gorilla that was incredibly heavy. Turned out it was heavy because it had been marinating in garbage juice for a few days. Lesson learned.
I furnished my first apartment mostly with trash, including a liquor store display that became my first bookshelf. How many librarians can make THAT claim!?
Spring at the college, that’s where it’s at! All those freshmen move out of the dorms, they throw away EVERYTHING instead of taking it home, and that’s where yours truly scored a George Forman Grill. That might sound gross, but I wasn’t able to afford a faded-celebrity-endorsed cooking gizmo that was remarkably efficient when it came to drying out a piece of chicken and was also very good at making paninis (I assume, I never tried, I have no idea what kind of bread you use for paninis I just looked it up. Ciabatta? I just told you I got this grill from the garbage, do I sound like I’ve got exotic breads just falling out of my kitchen cabinets?).
In Wish Upon, Ryan decides to go trash picking in the dumpster at his daughter’s high school, right at the beginning of the day, embarrassing her horribly.
Even as an amateur a trash picker, I can tell you that a public high school dumpster is not a destination dumpster. Nothing in there but embarrassing poetry drafts (hopes), crumpled homecoming invitations (dreams), and school lunch dregs (biohazards).
In the course of his trash pickin’, Ryan finds some sort of weird box, brings it home, and it ends up in Rory’s hands.
The box has a bunch of inscriptions on it, mostly in Chinese, but Rory figures out one of them reads Seven Wishes. Of course, Rory’s skeptical about a box from the garbage granting wishes, but she ends up making a wish that the school Mean Girl will rot. Which totally happens due to a case of necrotizing fasciitis.
What happened to necrotizing fasciitis? I felt like my chances of dying from that were like 60% just a few years ago, but now I feel like it’s all but gone? Thank goodness Wish Upon has come along to remind me of my irrational fears
Okay, so the Mean Girl rots.
are you waiting for the But? Because there’s a But.
The Mean Girl rots, but Rory’s dog dies.
Now, you and I, as viewers of a horror movie, know what’s going on. Rory got her wish, but there was a price to pay.
However, Rory does not put these pieces together. Which is, honestly, fair. One wish coming true could be a coincidence, and a dog dying, though sad, isn’t unheard of.
Next, Rory wishes Cute Boy would fall in love with her, which he does. But THEN Rory’s rich, estranged uncle dies. Remember that guy? The one we met for about 1 second because the movie needed us to know who he was? I told you we’d come back to him, and here we are!
Rory still doesn’t know what kind of movie she’s in, so when she hears her uncle is dead, she makes a third wish, that her dad will inherit her dead uncle’s wealth.
The dark consequence of that one? Rory’s old neighbor dies (played by Sherilyn Fenn, who you may know as Anna from Gilmore Girls. This movie is totally courting Gilmore Girls comparisons, this isn’t my fault!).
Rory keeps the wish train rolling and wishes her dad wasn’t embarrassing. And she returns home to find him playing jazz saxophone in the living room, and Rory’s friends, including Barb from Stranger Things, fawning over him.
I can buy young ladies fawning over Ryan Phillippe. He was good enough for Reese Witherspoon, and she was America’s Sweetheart. This math is sound.
But playing jazz saxophone? Am I out of line for suggesting that playing jazz saxophone is a more embarrassing dad move than looking through a dumpster?
Horror movies DO have a rich history of attractive saxophonists, most notably this guy from The Lost Boys. But that was METAL saxophone, not smooth jazz saxophone. And it was the 80’s.
~
Let’s break from the plot here and talk about something very important. This is the warning, the after school special of this edition of Cult Movie Vault.
Let me turn my hat backwards, turn my chair backwards. Maybe turn my pants backwards like Kriss Kross.
If you understood that Kriss Kross reference, I’m betting you get a lot of internet ads for Metamucil.
Hey, everyone. I’m here to talk to you about a serious condition that affects millions of horror movie victims: genre blindness.
Let’s spool out how genre blindness works with a question: When you’re watching a zombie movie, have the characters in that movie ever seen a zombie movie?
In some zombie movies, the characters never say the word zombie. They never say, Wow, this is just like Dawn of the Dead! That’s genre blindness.
When a character suffers from genre blindness, they exist in a world that is almost identical to our own but with one key difference: in their world, they are the first and only person to experience the genre they’re living in.
So, someone with genre blindness in a zombie movie would know everything you know EXCEPT for anything to do with zombies. I guess whether or not they’d know about Michael Jackson’s Thriller is a big question mark.
Wish Upon does genre blindness for the twisted wish genre. It would seem that the characters are totally aware of pop culture (though perhaps not its evolution beyond the awesomeness of saxophones in the late 80’s), EXCEPT for the genre of be careful what you wish for stories, which just so happen to be the story they’re in.
And this, my friends, is the true terror presented by Wish Upon.
~
When I think about Wish Upon and genre blindness too much, I start to wonder maybe I’m in a horror story, and maybe I, too, just don’t recognize the specific genre I’m in. I’m ready for a grey alien, I’m comfortably aged out of likely slasher targethood, shoot, I’m even prepared for a giant ball of Critters to try and roll over me, reducing me to a skeleton instantly. But what if I, like every horror movie character, am unfamiliar with ONE genre of horror, and that happens to be the ONE genre I’m living in!?
This is why it’s so critical that you watch Wish Upon and every other cult horror film you can get your hands on.
Sure, it might seem silly to watch Wish Upon, but one day, if you find a wish-granting box in the garbage, you’ll really regret not watching this movie.
And, yeah, maybe it seems like Army of Darkness is less useful to watch than a Ken Burns documentary, but in the event that you end up sent back in time and have to fight an army of skeletons led by your own clone who grew out of an eyeball on your shoulder, you’ll rue the day you decided to watch something productive and purposeful.
And, okay, it’s not super likely you’ll end up in a situation where Ghoulies are real, on the loose for the third time, and they’re going to college. But if you do
~
To close the Cult Movie Vault, let me just suggest that your library card might save your life.
Again, not in a metaphorical, the joy of reading saved my life kind of way.
In a very literal, Okay, I watched Psycho Goreman on Hoopla, and I know exactly what to do in this Psycho Goreman situation, kind of way.
Maybe it won’t happen. Maybe I’m just being alarmist.
But you won’t know until it’s too late
“