"Forget Barbara Eden, forget Robin Williams. Forget all you know," a New Agey folklore professor tells our plucky heroine Alexandra Amberson (Tammy Lauren) about Djinn, the hellish genie that haunts a southern California college town in Wes Craven's Wishmaster. Ostensibly a giant cockroach with a Frankenstein head, Djinn is the leader of the evil underworld who emanates from a precious opal that falls out of an ancient Persian statue. Once he lands in L.A., he gets a gory face-lift and morphs into Nathaniel, a suave, smooth-talking Chuck Woolery-like devil with icy blue eyes. His only defect, which nobody seems to notice, is his scarred complexion.

Nathaniel slyly wastes no time hunting down Alexandra, a college student who first examines the otherworldly gem. When her best friend, Josh, mysteriously combusts in the lab, Alexandra suspects supernatural foul play. But since everyone thinks she's still in shock from not being able to save her parents from their burning house when she was a kid, the Wishmaster has plenty of time to make her life miserable, demolishing everyone she knows by granting their deepest wishes in exchange for their souls.

OK, fair enough for a horror premise. In fact it worked to much more malevolent effect in Ray Bradbury's classic novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, in which Satan's carnival co-opted a small town's darkest desires. But any movie that opens with a title card that reads, "America, Present Day," isn't the stuff of diabolical nightmares.

Craven is riding high after the unexpected smash success of last winter's Scream. Unfortunately, Craven only served asÊexecutive producer on Wishmaster. The film was directed by Robert Kurtzman, who is responsible for all the monster makeup. That means that all the potentially spooky moments are squashed a beat too soon by close-ups of bloody heads, boils popping out of knuckles, ripped-open stomachs, etc.

There's some dumb fun in watching the Wishmaster wreak havoc on unsuspecting players, but he can be pretty obscure for an arch demon. Robert Englund is enjoyably hammy as a sleazy art collector. He seems to relish any screen time without the prosthetic Freddy mask he donned in Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street movies. Tammy Lauren tries to convey some genuine Heather Langenkamp-style fear, but so much of the gruesome action gets drowned in murky red lighting that it's hard to believe her screams of terror at phony ax-wielding statues and slithery snakes. "Be careful what you wish for," is the film's tag line Ð and if anyone even thinks about a sequel, I'll personally hack them up. (R).