Aladdin (2026) by Brett Bentman

Director: Brett Bentman

Year: 2026

Country: USA

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Supernatural Slasher

Plot:

Heading out to a remote house, a group of friends hopes to spend the weekend together helping a member get over their fears when they find a special lamp in the area, inadvertently freeing a malevolent genie who begins granting devious wishes against the group, and they must try to stop him.

Review:

This was a dreadful and just utterly dismal genre effort. Among the few positive points to be had here is the fun starting point that manages to offer up a potentially intriguing idea that gets undone when the rest of the events come into play. The idea of the group heading out to the cabin for a relaxing weekend and spending time together, but heading out to a series of misadventures that come about once they find a strange lamp at the house that starts granting them wishes, forcing them to get a handle on the powerful curse at the center of everything, brings this one together for a solid enough starting point. The panic and chaos that arises once the group starts to understand the idea of the lamp granting wishes and trying to come to grips with the backstory about the figure within the lamp itself sells everything together rather nicely, with the burgeoning idea of what’s going on being out of their control the more they interact with the lamp and its prisoner.

However, outside of that, there’s just nothing all that worthwhile here. The story is just not all that exciting at all, focusing on the different interactions between the group who are incredibly uninteresting and utterly bland, spending all the time we do with them doing nothing but hanging out around the cabin trying to get over her issues. Not only is the whole thing just not that interesting watching her try to get over the idea of her phobias and issues with each other, but it manages to just drag out the running time trying to focus on the rather dull interactions that go nowhere, trying to make this all interesting without having any kind of overt genre content going on. Even with the few interactions featured here giving this some action, the execution is wildly inept, as everything is photographed so no overt gore is featured and no real mess is visible. As well, the scenes feature some immensely obvious stupidity to make sure no one can get the upper hand on the group, and the inclusion of AI in several flash hallucination visions, all of which combine to make this one immensely troublesome and problematic.

Overview: 0.5/5

An absolutely disjointed and nearly worthless genre effort, there’s little reason for this one to go on, with the few likable elements not being all that impactful and plenty of major issues holding it back. This is really only for the most discerning indie genre fans and fans of the creative crew, while most others out there should outright avoid this.