It’s been ten years since we’ve had a new Friday the 13th movie, and nine years since we’ve had a new Nightmare on Elm Street. Boo-frickin’-hoo. Call me when you’ve had to wait 17 years for a new installment of one of your favorite franchises.

Oh, how I wish and wish we had more Wishmaster.

The Wishmaster movies, in case you don’t remember (and a lot of people don’t) are basically an evil version of Aladdin. In each film a hapless human releases a genie, or rather a “djinn,” and gets three wishes. But these aren’t singing and dancing cartoon genies. These are unholy monsters with godlike powers, who can only use those powers to fulfill the dreams of their enemy: mankind.

The rules change slightly from film to film, but the djinn in the Wishmaster movies all have the same weakness. They can do literally anything, but only if someone asks them to. Fortunately these “wishmasters” have diabolical senses of humor and a devilish ear for loopholes. If you’re vain and wish you could be beautiful forever, you’d better believe a djinn is turning you in a mannequin. If you’re a prison inmate who got screwed over by the system, and you wish for your lawyer to go fuck himself, your lawyer is going to show up and his spine is going to twist and break as he somehow… er, gets that job done.

The Wishmaster movies are all mixed bags but, more so than most other horror franchises, every single one is based on cleverness, and manipulating the villain’s powers and rules in creative ways. Even the worst Wishmaster sequels have a few interesting ideas in them. And the best entries in the series are a stone cold hoot.

The first Wishmaster stars Andrew Divoff as the Djinn, whose voice is more gravely than a rock quarry. He’s called forth into the present day by an art appraiser, played by Tammy Lauren, and when she finishes making her three wishes come true he will be freed from captivity to conquer the Earth.

Seems simple enough: don’t wish for anything, right? Well, the djinn can technically grant ANYBODY’s wishes, so he doles out ironic deaths left and right, forcing our hero to do something to stop him. But the djinn can’t be killed, so how the heck do you defeat him? How do you trick a genie into tricking himself?

Wishmaster features a cavalcade of horror luminaries, most of whom get killed off in spectacular fashion. Ted Raimi, Angus Scrimm, Kane Hodder, Tony Todd and Reggie Bannister all stop by to make the first Wishmaster a fun basket of easter eggs for horror fans. If the film hadn’t been a sincere old-school monster movie mash-up that came out immediately in the wake of Scream, which ushered in a wave of overwhelming metatextual irony, horror fans might have rallied around it more.

But the first Wishmaster was successful enough to warrant three sequels, and the first one – Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies – just two years later, is solid. In the follow-up, Andrew Divoff returns and gets released by an art thief, played by Holly Fields, who experiences a crisis of faith after killing a security guard. The djinn is discovered at the scene of the crime and then spends a lot of the film stuck in prison, because he can’t break himself out unless someone asks him to. Fortunately, there are a whole ton of wishes to be made in a building full of incarcerated criminals.

Wishmaster 2 features some memorable kills – the guy who wishes to walk through the bars of his cell probably should have added the word “unharmed,” for example – and Divoff really does seem to relish his all-powerful, yet perpetually annoyed character. The ending is basically a rehash of the original, because there are only so many ways to circumnavigate the djinn’s omnipotence and rules, but it works.

The last two sequels are cheaper – much, much cheaper – and they suffer for the loss of Divoff, whose role gets taken over by John Novak; he just doesn’t have the same evil twinkle in his eye. Wishmaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell and Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled look and feel like really low-budget straight-to-video sequels, and yet they still manage to have a few interesting ideas between them.

In Wishmaster 3, the djinn is released in a college and when he’s not murdering co-eds, he’s forcing the heroine, played by A.J. Cook, to make her wishes. To her credit, she comes up with a doozie. Whereas the original Wishmaster hero wished for the djinn to blow his brains out (it didn’t work but it hurt like hell), this one wishes for… get this… the archangel Michael to come to Earth and protect her.

That’s a really, REALLY big flex and a huge addition to the mythology of Wishmaster. If demons are real, angels probably are too, and one of them is now her very own Kyle Reese, in a riff on Terminator where the cyborg is an all-powerful monster god. Cool premise, weak execution. But it proves that there’s still plenty of life left in this franchise, if anyone wanted to make the most of it and spend more than a few bucks.

Wishmaster: The Prophecy Fulfilled takes the series in a brand new direction with a genuinely clever concept. The djinn gets released by a woman played by Tara Spencer-Nairn, who has real problems: her boyfriend is paralyzed after an accident, and his insecurity has made him paranoid about his girlfriend having an affair. The djinn kills and steals the face of the interloper, and uses that intimacy to goad her into making wishes. She’s already wished that they’d win a legal settlement and for her boyfriend to walk again. And getting her to make that third wish is extremely easy too, but…

Her third wish is to be able to love the djinn, for who he really is. He can’t trick her into loving the man he’s pretending to be, and he can’t release his omnipotent brethren onto the Earth until he fulfills her wish. For once it’s the djinn who’s completely stymied, because the protagonist accidentally stumbled into some tricky wordplay of her own, and that’s a smart reversal of the Wishmaster premise. Even if the production values are embarrassingly low and the acting is… let’s go with “mixed,” The Prophecy Fulfilled once again proves that there’s nothing wrong with the franchise. It’s a series of good ideas in search of a classier production.

And yet, even though there were four films in the franchise, and even though other, equally “mixed bag” horror series have dedicated followings, nobody seems to be wishing for a Wishmaster reboot. And that’s a damn shame. The premise is simple yet unique, transforming the old Monkey’s Paw routine into a slasher movie scenario, with copious opportunities for unusual deaths and unique storylines. There’s plenty of room to refine, subvert and have a wicked good time with the Wishmaster series.

I wish more people would watch it and find out.