Parents' Guide to

Wish Upon

By Jeffrey Anderson, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 14+

Uninspired horror movie has shallow characters, few scares.

Movie PG-13 2017 90 minutes
Wish Upon Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

age 15+

Based on 6 parent reviews

age 17+

Bad Message to Teens

Gruesome storytelling of a hapless plot made worst but using a teen cast to suggest there is a moral to the story.

This title has:

Too much violence
age 15+

Missed sexuality in reviews

None of it was mentioned in the official parent guide but there is talk of foreskin/clitoris in a pretty graphic manor and “tit pics”

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (6):
Kids say (16):

This modern-day, teen-centric take on W. W. Jacobs's classic horror story The Monkey's Paw is a not-scary dud that suffers from both uninspired scares ad extremely shallow, annoying characters. "What's wrong with you?," characters keep asking Clare -- and viewers are likely to be wondering the same thing. Screenwriter Barbara Marshall (Terra Nova) and director John R. Leonetti (Annabelle) fail to paint Clare as a truly desperate character: She's cute, she has two best friends, a home, a loving father, and so on. Her life isn't terrible enough to risk everything on deadly wishes, and it's hard to root for her.

Frankly, it's pretty easy to despise her, especially when she goes on a materialistic shopping spree while family, friends, and neighbors are dying all around her. And while those scenes could have been clever, Final Destination-type moments, full of menacing surprise, instead they're dumb exercises in waiting for the inevitable. Wish Upon vacillates between asking us to care for its characters and inviting us to enjoy the scary stuff, and that inability to take a stand gets it nowhere.

Movie Details

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