Others on the set of Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies conjured in downtown LA are cashing in their chips in even more spectacular ways. A roulette wheel cuts loose from its green felt-covered table, sprouts blades and spins across the floor in pursuit of fresh game. The expression "snake eyes" develops a whole new definition as small vipers leap from a pair of dice into the peepers of one high roller at the craps table.
But this is business as usual for the djinn (or "genie" to the fairy-tale set) who first materialized in 1997's successful Wishmaster. Evidently, Artisan (formerly Live) Entertainment liked the odds enough to bet a limited budget on a sequel, so lo and behold, Wishmaster 2 is leering for the camera, albeit with a general change in personnel and a tightening of the money belt. Director Robert Kurtzman and his KNB EFX team have moved on to pricier pastures while Jack Sholder, having revealed The Hidden and other horrors, takes command as writer/director. On the FX front, Fango's own Anthony C. Ferrante is supervising the work of J.M. Logan (modifying the djinn visage) and SOTA FX (handling gore and other special make-up). The production designer is Alfred Sole, continuing his career move away from directing such films as the 1977 cult fave Alice, Sweet Alice. The movie will debut on HBO this spring before terrorizing video stores in October.
The only prominent veteran returning for seconds is deep-voiced Andrew Divoff, confirming his wish to continue developing the seductively deadly djinn over a series of movies. While the actor has essayed villainous roles in Air Force One and other action projects, he speaks of the evil genie with almost paternal affection. even a few invitations to dignify other genre efforts with his imposing presence left him pleased but seemingly unimpressed.
"I got other offers on a couple of [TV] pilots that seemed liked spin-offs of The X Files and that type of thing," the tall, muscular Divoff explains as he ducks behind a dressing trailer partition to don some contemporary clothes for the djinn's human form, Nathaniel Demarest. "I was selective about it. I'm devoted to this character, and I'm not looking for it to be a bridge to anything else. To me, this is the quintessential and definitive horror role. You have the dual personality, a chance to be both suave and menacing. It's a great palette to paint from."
And it's a relief to hear that the detailing of Divoff's portrait of the djinn hasn't suffered much from the frugality, tight 27-day schedule and the fact that this expansion will bypass a theatrical release for cable. "We're shooting this one in less than half the time on a much smaller budget," Divoff admits, "but the standard and commitment are as high as they were on the first. There is a loyalty to the legend and mythology, and you can see it on the faces of the crew."
Divoff is nevertheless freshening the djinn a bit through the ease with which he wears his human guise of Demarest, and developing his gift of gab. One tense scene involves Demarest confronted by police outside an art gallery, the scene of his liberation from his gemstone prison during the course of a robbery. Divoff looks down the barrel of one detective's magnum with admirable calm, although the gleam in his eye remains unmistakable. The djinn has already dispatched most of the thieves, and his request that the law "chill out" contains a distinctly sinister ring.
"He enjoys the human facade he's taken on," Divoff says, "and he likes the fact that this guy is cool. One of the mortal qualities that the djinn loves is the use of colloquialisms, employing the idiom. In the first one he loved to say things like 'Burn 'em, baby,' and we're developing more of that here."
Divoff's enthusiasm extends to the full-body djinn outfit fashioned by the SOTA wizards, along with an embryonic version for his transformation scene. The actor, contemplating the divided platform constructed for the occasion, is both impressed and amused by the larva-like tail he will be trailing behind his head in the wake of t he creature's escape from the gem. "The djinn appears, pops up onto a wall, slides down and across the floor in the first stage of his formation, which is very cool-looking," Divoff reveals. "I'll be on the floor here [underneath the platform] with the tail attached to my head on top while being pulled across on a roller. This should be a lot of fun."
Still, Divoff is still quick to keep his priorities straight with the wish to adhere to horror film fundamentals. "The key," he says, "is that we're discovering and developing the characters of the djinn and Demarest more. We're not relying so heavily on the special effects, which are, by their very nature, special. But the public may be getting a little jaded with that stuff. I got a sense of that with audiences seeing The Lost World as a follow-up to Jurassic Park. They say, 'We've seen that. Why don't you show us something new?' We decided to take this back to the common denominators of character and story.
Writer/director Sholder was at least equally insistent on these basics, due to both the dictates of a scant budget and the desire for stronger personality and plotting over pyrotechnics. During a morning break, he outlines the basic Wishmaster 2 story, noting that this sequel contains zero input from the original director Kurtzman or the film's writer, Peter Atkins. Following the art gallery break-in and the djinn's release, art thief Morgana (Holly Fields from Communion and Seedpeople) soon finds herself contemplating the windfall of three wishes and the puzzle of why Demarest decides to take the rap for the robbery following their arrest. The djinn rightly reasons that prison would be a particulary happy hunting ground for souls to add to his collection, and he is soon behind bars, orchestrating gruesome demises tied to backfiring wishes on the part of fellow inmates.
And the djinn, amazingly enough, finds a friend and willing soul donor in an elderly member if the Russian Mafia he encounters on the inside. The incarcerated duo eventually escape, leading the djinn to easy pickings among Soviet gangsters and other potential victims in the Las Vegas casinos. Morgana, meanwhile, slowly concludes that it's up to her to straighten out and do whatever's humanly possible to cause the djinn to fold his hand.
"This should be a lot more fun than the first," Sholder says, trying to ignore the clatter of props being shuffled about on the casino set currently controlled by the 2nd unit. "It keeps moving around. We spent a week with the prison scenes[filmed in LA's abandoned Lincoln Heights Jail], then came here to set up our casino. During the first week, it was hard to tell we were shooting a horror film.
"There's more Demarest, less djinn and more humor to this one," Sholder continues. "When Demarest comes in, he's pretty rigid, but by the time he gets to Las Vegas he's rocking and rolling. I found the first one kind of arch, stiff and obvious, and the djinn was [more simply] The Creature. In this one he's mostly Andy Divoff. There wasn't even much thought of bringing Divoff back, but I believed he was the best thing Wishmaster had going. He's kind of what it's all about."
There are, nevertheless, other fresh elements beyond the new emphasis on Demarest and additional humor that, Sholder reassures, stops well short of transforming the djinn into a new Freddy Krueger. "There's a whole different aspect to our movie concerning redemption," the director explains. "This young woman, Morgana, has some spiritual qualities that she repressed when she went the wrong way. She needs to correct that and come to grips with her spirituality. She finds a scripture that makes a reference to a 'woman pure of heart.' She tells a priest, 'Well, I guess I've got some work to do,' goes through this whole mortification process and actually cuts her own finger off. She changes her whole look, goes to confession and returns all the jewels she's stole. But it's not quite enough."
Sounds like a tall order, yet Fields seems more than up to the task, and responds to Sholder's praise that "She's terrific as Morgana and looks great on film" with admirable poise. The fast-talking Fields, having dealt with alien visitation in earlier films, is now enjoying a character who begins as a criminally inclined punkette and ends as a kind of saint doing battle with the djinn.
"I felt she was like La Femme Nikita the moment I read the script," the actress recalls. "I start off with punklike hair, dreadlocks, lots of chains. I have these Betty Page-ish short bangs. Then I transform into the good and pure version of Morgana, changing from the bottom to the top in a very short time. It's pretty drastic."
Fields remembers that she had to go to other extremes to land the part, requiring several meetings to eliminate competition and convince the casting personnel that she was the woman for the job. "I went back again and again," she says with a rueful grin, "but there were quite a few girls tested. I saw new faces each time. But I sensed I was going to get it from the beginning, which is rare. I'm glad I was right.
"when I first went in, they gave me four different scenes," she adds, "and told me to pick two. Some of the other girls had picked the same scenes I did, so they asked me to do the other ones instead. That was hard to do cold."
The difficulty ultimately paid off with what Fields describes as an unprecedented level of freedom in molding the role to suit her instincts. She credits Sholder with cutting her sufficient slack to adapt in her own way to the significant transformation Morgana undergoes. "Jack is so into letting the actors help develop the role yourself, because you know where you want to go. I've never had so much say in a part, and it really helped me view Morgana better. I've never felt this close to a character in my life.
Fields' ruminations on the rewards of a hard-won role are politely interrupted by an assistant who leads her off for a makeup application, and Fango seizes the opportunity to follow and get a peak at the SOTA wizards at work. They're ensconced, it turns out, in a trailer outside the set near the street, but the sound of downtown LA traffic fails to drown out the easygoing humor of Roy Knyrim, the founding partner (with Jerry Macaluso) of the busy FX company.
Knyrim is presently tending to cuts and abrasions on the lovely legs of an extra as she makes a few comments suggesting a young Mae West. Knyrim fortunately retains his focus, acknowledging that KNB was too pricey to return for this sequel after their impressive work on part one. He's rightly proud, however, of SOTA's grace under the dual pressures of a tight budget and schedule.
"It's been so much work and not enough money to hire a lot of people on this show," Knyrim laments, nevertheless acknowledging that this is often par to straight-to-video production's course. "But we still have plenty of what we call hero effects, spending a lot of time building them and about half a day to shoot each one. There's the transformation[after the djinn's emergence from the gem], the sadistic prisoner being ground through the bars, a man turned inside out and a blackjack dealer's chest exploding.
"Then there's a gambler they call the Snake Eyes that I actually get to play," Knyrim chuckles. "The djinn comes over to the craps table, tosses the dice and they come up double ones. He calls out 'Snake eyes!' and rattlesnakes leap out of the dice and go into my eyes. We made a puppet of me for this one. There's a lot of stuff like that in this movie, kind of like gory visual puns and blood effects like we did for Fist of the North Star."
Another casino killer, the deadly roulette wheel, is being brought to life through both on-set and CGI FX. “The wheel starts spinning around really fast as the balls fly off and hit people’s faces like bullets, then it sprouts knives as it rolls across the floor after victims,” Knyrim says like a proud inventor.
Visiting practical FX maestro Marcus Keys then reveals an even more extreme example of the djinn’s penchant for turning vernacular phrases into grotesque realities. "I believe in the script it says 'man f***ing himself,'" Key says. "I think you will get the idea of what's happening, but it's not as graphic as it might have been. We left most of that to the sound effects manager. You just see the guys head and shoulders and basically have to use your imagination."
The mind’s eye is not nearly as much of a factor in visualizing the new djinn look created by Logan. The artist has whipped up a few powerful improvements to the creature’s visage, as well as some decoratively mystic tattooing on the latex body suit donned by Divoff in monster mode. “The face is very similar [to the first incarnation] even if the tentacles are smoothed out a little bit,” Logan notes. “I wanted to give him more of an ethnic feel, since he is an ethnic monster-a genie-so that’s where we got the tattooing and scarring."
It’s fairly obvious, upon inspection, that the djinn’s true colors and present innovations reside in the body work. “Jack [Sholder] wanted to give him a more powerful feel,” Logan explains with a glance at the buff contours of his latex creation. “In the first one, he mostly had robes. We did this full makeup suit because Jack wanted a [muscular] chest and legs. It’s more menacing. If you saw this in a dark alley, you’d run the other way.”
Equally imposing is the complexity of juggling Logan and SOTA’s makeup work with Keys’ practical gags and the contributions of the CGI and animatronics teams. Supervisor Ferrante, however, is up to Wishmaster 2’s demands, serving as something of a troubleshooter as he bounces between sets (erected in the interior of the old Robinson’s department store) and deals with budgetary and scheduling questions. “We have roughly an eighth to one-sixteenth of the FX budget they had for the first one,” Ferrante reveals, “but we definitely have the same ambition. They had a lot more effects on the first movie, yet they wanted to do quite a bit for the money [on this one]. That’s why they usually bring me in on these things. I try to figure it out, select the right people and maintain the quality.”
Ferrante also felt a responsibility to remain true to the djinn vision that KNB created for the first Wishmaster. While the KNB team couldn’t return for this follow-up, those behind part two feel that their legacy has to be preserved. “Even if [KNB] couldn’t realistically afford to do it, they were very protective of the djinn and the way he looked,” Ferrante says. “They really wanted us to live up to what they had created, and we certainly observed that as much as possible. They felt that SOTA would preserve the integrity of what they had done.”
Yet there’s still room for a respectful experiment or two, and Ferrante is preparing to oversee the clever transformation setup previously described by Divoff. Ferrante and Knyrim perch on the sectioned, partitioned platform that will bear the burden of the reborn djinn in his larval stage, and Ferrante takes pride in what sounds to Fango like a relatively new trick of the trade. “I was talking to Josh Logan,” Ferrante recalls, “and we wondered what would happen if the contents of the gem were really alive. This gem is kind of like a cordial cherry, in a way. Outside it’s solid, but inside it’s gooey with a kind of organic life to it. So we developed it with a tentacle that shoots out, almost hitting one of the robbers in the eye, but ending up on the wall. It starts bubbling, and before you know it these eyes pop out, followed by the head. The head sort of protrudes, slides down time wall, then crawls across this floor.”
While Ferrante and company were whipping up these twists to the djinn mythology, it was up to production designer Sole to supply a visual foundation and background to play them out against. Sole, having foregone directing in recent years, has chosen to focus on coordinating the general look of films ranging from Mark L. Lester’s Right of the Running Man to TV movies like Face of Evil and Halloweentown. He has become an expert at set detailing and color schemes, and is a critical figure in granting Wishmaster 2’s desire for a menacing mood.
Sole’s atmospheric touch can be felt within the shadows of the art gallery set and the subdued reds coloring the so-called “Gem Room,” the djinn’s personal quarters and jewel-bedecked soul repository. There may be bloodier doings in the brightly lit casino he helped concoct for the climax, but there’s more of a chill to these other chambers. “I wanted to have a kind of European look for this film, cold and monochromatic,” Sole explains. “I used a very limited palette in considering the wardrobe and everything else. I come from The old English school of horror films, with everything very subtle.”
Sole apparently feels little or no remorse over having left the directing field, noting that his training as an architect is substantially more aligned with his current career. His heart is clearly warmed by the cult status afforded Alice, Sweet Alice— “I’m amazed that people still like it,” he says—yet it’s simply not enough to lure him back to the directing battlegrounds. “But it’s nice to know what being a director is like,” Sole nevertheless allows, “and they certainly have my sympathy and support. I don’t enjoy the process of directing myself unless I find something I’m really on fire about. Production design is another story. It’s more in keeping with architecture, which was my first love.”
Sole cites the classic Hammer films as a major influence on his film work, but his enthusiasm also encompasses the genre in general, and Wishmaster 2 specifically. “This one’s a lot of fun for me,” Sole says. “I love the horror elements and the Wishmaster character in particular It’s great to create an illusion This is a genre entertainment, but that’s not necessarily all there is to it. There can also be, one hopes, a degree of passion somewhere.”
© Fangoria Magazine, April 1999
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