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A Chinese music box springs to life in the high-school horror movie "Wish Upon," but the plot of this distasteful mess is even more mechanical.
The music box appears in the life of Clare (Joey King), an artistically inclined wallflower who lives in a beat-up old house with her dad (Ryan Phillippe), who makes a meager living scrounging junk from Dumpsters around their Ohio town. There's a perpetual cloud over their lives, after Clare's mom (Elisabeth Rohm) hanged herself in their attic 12 years earlier.
Clare, who conveniently studies Chinese in school, recognizes a couple of the characters on the box: "Seven wishes." In the height of teen angst, she idly makes a wish that her personal bully, popular girl Darcie Chapman (Josephine Langford), "would just rot." The next morning, Darcie wakes up with flesh-eating disease. Later that day, Clare discovers her dog dead in the crawl space under the house.
It takes Clare a few wishes, and a few more gruesome deaths, to figure out there's a connection. By then, the school jock, Paul (Mitchell Slaggart), is obsessively in love with her, she's inherited immense wealth and she's the most popular girl in school. It's up to Clare's pre-popularity friends, Meredith (Sydney Park) and June (Shannon Purser, aka Barb from "Stranger Things"), and Chinese-reading nerdy boyfriend material Ryan (Ki Hong Lee, from "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt"), to persuade Clare to give up the wishing box before more people die.
Writer Barbara Marshall sets up the wishes and deaths in a laborious lather-rinse-repeat cycle. But she also opens up a Pandora's box of teen issues — suicide, cyberbullying, online distractions — that the movie is ill-equipped to handle with any level of wit or care.
Director John R. Leonetti ("Annabelle") blows past such seriousness. He's far more interested in staging just-gory-enough death scenes with the same predictable dread and Rube Goldberg mechanics that made the "Final Destination" series such a slog. Spoiler: When you see a bathtub, garbage disposal or modern art with pointy bits, you are safe to assume the character in the vicinity is a goner. (If you're a fan of gore, wait for the inevitable "unrated" DVD release.)
King, a cute-as-a-button teen actor with a long résumé that includes "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Going in Style," is ill-served by the material. She's too nice to make Clare's torment, and her flirtation with the dark side, feel authentic. King deserves a better starring role, because this is a script you wouldn't wish upon your worst enemy.
Twitter: @moviecricket —
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'Wish Upon'
A teen comes into possession of a magic music box in this horror movie that's unsettling in all the wrong ways.
Where • Theaters everywhere.
When • Opens Friday, July 14.
Rating • PG-13 for violent and disturbing images, thematic elements and language.
Running time • 90 minutes.