In short: The Final Wish (2018)

Following the death of his father, luckless lawyer without career options and money Aaron (Michael Welch) returns to his home town to continue the fights he and his mother (Lin Shaye) never grew out of, pine after his former girlfriend Lisa (Melissa Bolona) – who is now together with his old nemesis, town sheriff, asshole and potential abuser Derek (Kaiwi Lyman). Well, actually, he’s just coming for the funeral, but that’s not really how things play out.

For strange things clearly connected to a sealed urn belonging to Aaron’s antiques dealer father start happening. Whenever Aaron makes a wish (and Aaron uses the phrase “I wish” with the absurd regularity of a character in a script with a certain lack of imagination) it becomes true; not in totally benign ways, mind you: when he wishes himself to be prettier, for example, he gets hit by a car and the resulting plastic surgery does indeed improve his looks. Or that’s what the film and everyone around him says, for in one of this thing’s better ideas, there’s barely any visible difference at all there.

Irregularly, the wishes do cost the lives of people as a price, but the film never sets this part of the wishing rules up terribly well, and really only seems to include them because a horror film needs to have corpses in it, or something. Obviously, Aaron has acquired a jinn, and just as obviously, things are not going to stay nice and profitable for him for long. Though, making things easier on a guy whose middle name apparently is “I wish”, this jinn doesn’t grant the traditional three wishes but seven.

Timothy Woodward Jr.’s The Final Wish is one of those examples of contemporary horror I wish I liked better than I actually do. It certainly looks pretty good (particularly for its budget bracket), and the director does add some neat little touches to some of the spookier scenes. I also enjoy how much the film starts out as your typical US indie movie about a luckless guy returning to his hometown; that is, for as long as it actually seems to put the proper effort into building the characters and their situation. Soon enough, we drop down into cliché horror movie character land where people turn into idiots whenever the script demands it, and where the character relations the film first sketched out well enough are never filled in properly, because it prefers spending its running time on co-writer Jeffrey Reddick chasing his one big success, Final Destination, with a couple of kill scenes that pointlessly and without any thematic reason play out like a cheaper and more subdued version of that franchise, bargain basement Lynchisms like a random clown appearance, Tony Todd popping in for a scene of pointless exposition, and other stuff that gets the film nowhere. And let’s not even mention the embarrassing look of the jinn once we get to see it.


There’s a good movie hiding under all the dross, one that talks about lives not going as well as those living them wished (see what I did there?) via an evil jinn that actually uses the yearning that comes with not living up to any of one’s dreams for evil, but the film we actually get is a deeply mediocre bit of cliché horror wasting talent and time on things I’ve seen done better a thousand times.

The Midnight Man (2016)

Young Alex (Gabrielle Haugh) has returned to the old family home – the place where her mother hanged herself in front of her when she was a child, no less – to care for her grandmother Anna (Lin Shaye) who is suffering from dementia of increasing severity. One night, when she is visited by her best friend Miles (Grayson Daniel) – of course he’s secretly in love with her, this is a movie after all and the movie rule book says all male best friends of women are pining for them – she stumbles upon a very creepypasta little game/ritual hidden away in a box.

The “game” evokes an entity known as the Midnight Man (Kyle Strauts) who is allergic to salt, lit candles, and fair play, and who supposedly likes to kill people with their greatest fears. Of course, Alex and Miles start playing, and of course, the Midnight Man turns out to be very real indeed, so our heroes will have to fight for their lives – as well as listen to a Robert Englund shaped exposition dispenser – until the Midnight Man’s allotted time span in the real world is over.

Travis Z’s The Midnight Man has quite a few obvious flaws, mostly concerning its pacing and plot logic. Englund’s exposition dump for example brings the film to a screeching halt at the worst possible moment, the characters just shrugging off the plight of a trapped friend a few rooms off because they just need to listen to that sweet, sweet exposition. During this, Englund repeatedly emphasizes that time is of the essence – while standing around, talking at the characters. Then there is that whole business about the Midnight Man using a person’s greatest fears against them: apparently “I killed my pet rabbit as a child” counts as a fear in the Midnight Man rule book, as does disliking pain. On the other hand, the pet rabbit business enables the film to let its inner freak flag fly and put a very fake looking rabbit head on the Midnight Man, which sits nicely between the goofily absurd and the somewhat disturbing, a position where our antagonist’s usual outfit rests as well.

Generally, while the film’s story is sparse and its dramatic arc is not at all smooth, there’s a sometimes very effective mood of dread and the strange running through it, the director not only using his experience as a production designer – as well as a lot of clever lighting tricks - to create a wonderfully creepy house for the characters to stumble and creep through but also demonstrating a nicely developed sense for strange horror sequences that reminded me a little of a more down to Earth Nightmare on Elm Street. The film’s narrative may at times be rather rough in its attempts to mix classical gothic revival tropes like Alex’s family history with supernatural slasher tropes and creepypasta style horror but its attempt to do so is certainly imaginative and enjoyable to watch if one can just ignore silly things like plot logic. Fortunately, I can.

The film’s good side is further enhanced by Lin Shaye’s performance. What starts as a relatively realistic (and therefore rather sad) portrayal of dementia evolves into the craziness of your classic psycho-biddy, combining outright scenery-chewing with enough subtlety and actual evil for it to be entertaining as well as creepy. The young actors are solid enough, Englund does his expository duty with his usual professionalism, even provides his functional role with a bit of human warmth, and Strauts does the physical part of his Midnight Man duty (clearly enhanced, and I really mean enhanced, by CGI) with aplomb. I would have preferred the MM to not have been quite as talkative as he turned out to be but that might just be my general love for mute (well, moaning, weeping, gibbering and meeping are okay) supernatural evil and dislike for capital-E Evil that feels the need to add bad punning to its sins.


So, even though I have no problem at all seeing why The Midnight Man isn’t exactly well loved, I had rather a great time with it.