Director: Chris Angel
Year: 2001
Country: Canada/USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural Slasher
Plot:
After finding a sacred jewel, a troubled college student learns she has unleashed a powerful Djinn who begins to terrorize her friends around campus to get her to free other enslaved beings like him through a series of devious wishes he can grant her for freeing him, and forces her to stop the deadly being.
Review:
This turned out to be quite a decent if slightly flawed effort. One of the better aspects here is the fact that, despite the rather limited amount of action, this one still manages to remain pretty interesting throughout by keeping up a solid, workable pace that keeps things moving along. The discovery is made quite early on and it's a short time after when the true threat of his deceiving is revealed which makes his threat somewhat constant around them so that keeps the first half going pretty smoothly with the different displays of his possession on both her friends and students which makes these quite fun with all the temptations to his new identity going over their heads. Those play into the fact that the second half is built a lot more on the chase established from these scenes as the race to her him under control and stop tormenting her friends, and the action scenes here which includes the church ambush with its resulting spiritually-charged battle, the battle in the dorms and finally the big car chase which all plays together into some fun times throughout here.
These here do manage to help this out and overcome its flaws, but there are still a few prominent ones here. The most notable one here is the fact that there's so little interest in the threat generated here even though the creature is trying to overthrow the world yet it never really gives that off in how relaxed they are towards his taunting behavior towards them and how long the whole thing takes to sink in for the group to believe. It may actually have gone over better if the Djinn had any real motivating factor here, as all he does is go after the friends when he has a connection with her and could find her immediately, so playing around how lamely he does here just doesn't come off well. The last area here that's quite weak is the finale, which is way too abrupt and doesn't really resolve any of the storylines featured, even her backstory that was set up from the start. Otherwise, there's not a whole lot really wrong here, and it's much better than expected.
Overview: ***/5
Pretty good but decidedly weaker entry than the previous efforts, there's enough going on here to be somewhat worthwhile, even though there are a few big flaws that keep it down quite heavily. Those with an interest in this type of genre effort or who are fans of the franchise will be the main ones for the film, while most others out there should heed caution.
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