What sound does a genie playing the drums make? An awful djinn! Moving swiftly on(!), my film watch on 27 September 2022 was the 2012 SyFy fantasy/horror movie Aladdin and the Death Lamp.
Directed by Mario Azzopardi, and released as a TV movie in 2012 by SyFy Channel, Aladdin and the Death Lamp provides the viewer with an action-packed storyline, albeit one that plays very fast and loose with the familiar 1001 Nights version that we all know so well today.
Basically, it's all about the desperate search by Aladdin (played by martial arts practitioner Darren Shahlavi) and three companions (one of whom, the wise village elder/magician Khalil, is played by Eugene Clark) for a magical ring that will prevent all the djinns currently imprisoned in Hell to be released.
However, this is something that Aladdin's deadly rival, an avaricious, unscrupulous market trader named Sharira (George Ghali), is hell-bent (so to speak!) in achieving, being under the dangerous delusion that he could actually bend these immensely-powerful supernatural beings to his puny will once he'd released them. Yeah, right! (For a much more detailed coverage of the lengthy, convoluted plot, please click here.)
What is so memorable about this movie, at least for me, is that instead of including the nowadays-standardised friendly, slapstick, whimsical Robin Williamsian genie, it features a ferocious demonic djinn of the kind present in traditional Arabian lore – one that cunningly twists its bestowing of the wishes demanded of it by its lamp's owner into nightmarish responses that bring the wisher terror and death instead of joy and fulfillment.
Inevitably, therefore, a fair amount of blood/gore scenes are present too, albeit brief in tenure, making this movie by far the darkest treatment of the Aladdin saga that I have viewed. Despite its limited budget, moreover, its CGI djinn is impressively crafted as a kind of caliginous reptilian smoke entity, which works very effectively, but its CGI tiger (into which the djinn briefly transforms in order to kill evil market trader Sharira's luckless servant and absorb his soul) rather less so.
Nonetheless, Aladdin and the Death Lamp is a bold and largely successful attempt to take the Aladdin storyline down what for it is the previously-untravelled path of a horror movie, yet which is actually closer atmospherically to the original tale than are any of the other major cinematic Aladdin versions out there. Well worth a watch!
And if you'd like to pay a brief visit to the djinn-haunted realm of Aladdin and the Death Lamp, be sure to click here to view on YouTube the dramatic scene marking the djinn's ominous first appearance when Aladdin rubs its lamp and thereby inadvertently releases it.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
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