‘Wish Upon’ Will Satisfy Your Craving for a Campy Summer Horror Flick – Cleveland Scene Weekly

Family experiences tragic event. Surviving, adolescent member of the family finds a possessed object he's not supposed to. The friends, family and/or the kids who bully the person at school are subsequently killed off, until the main character manages to destroy or subdue the aforementioned possessed object. The main character is possessed himself, with varying results.

Most teen horror flicks today tend to utilize a variety (if not all) of these ingredients with a healthy dose of social media drama thrown in. Their only truly inventive aspects, at this point, are the ways in which characters are killed off. Wish Upon is no exception; if the films goal was to execute this tired but profitable formula, while reaffirming the general publics belief that teenage girls are the worst, it does so admirably.

Clare starts making wishes, oblivious to the boxs big catch: for each one she makes, someone close to her dies. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), Clare is a broody outcast and only interacts with about seven people.

Wish Upon assembles a decent cast to play out this nightmare scenario, especially 17-year-old King. Phillippe might be condemned from now on to painfully average network shows (this fall, he portrays a guy named Bob Swagger on USAs Shooter). But King has the potential to graduate from playing B-Lister's daughters and members of hapless horror movie families; she grounds the film with a convincing, appropriately disturbing performance.

Barb from Stranger Things (Shannon Purser) plays one of Clare's two friends, and The Maze Runner's Ki Hong Lee is an intense, welcome presence in her life as a Chinese classmate who assists in deciphering the box's message.

Wish Upon is mostly by-the-numbers camp (except for the fact that Phillippes character plays the saxophone, which is a bizarre and meme-worthy twist). But it does generate some legitimate suspense, particularly when alternating between character's grisly deaths and the sinister box that's causing them. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it'll satiate your desire for a mostly cheesy, occasionally gory horror movie.

It should also be noted that the film was met with raucous cheers from the Cleveland Cinemas audience at the advance screening during two unprecedented aerial shots of downtown Cleveland. I cant imagine it will receive the same gracious applause anywhere else.

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'Wish Upon' Will Satisfy Your Craving for a Campy Summer Horror Flick - Cleveland Scene Weekly

Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero