Ouija

The kids just can't resist using the spirit board.

I just got back a few hours ago after wasting some coin on this contrived, "let's bump off some kids in flat, uninspired fashion", predictable, wrought-with-cheap-jump-scares PG-13 waste of time supernatural horror film. A Ouija board is located in the attic by the teenaged occupant of this old house with a history. A mother had two daughters, got all into spiritualism through constant connections with dark spirits through seances and spirit boards and doing so opened a channel for them into our world. A mother dies, a child goes missing, and the third member of this trio wound up in the loony bin. The teen beauty who found the board, played on it, called up the spirits, and let loose something quite dark. I found the plot a bit much because we are told that the Mother is scary with a twist late telling us different. Yet prior to the twist, Danielle (the girl who commits suicide) takes a hanging with Christmas lights and tells her bestie, Laine (Olivia Cooke, who I think still has the potential of a good horror film but just hasn't found it yet) under the gaze into the planchett eye as a spirit to avoid Mother. Mother has a mission, you see, and that is later identified after our teens keep fooling around with the spirit board. Pretty much everyone in the theatre was asking Laine why she kept going back to that Ouija board. Of course she must in order for the film to keep sending out the spirit terror, but Laine is made to look like a fool over and over. It is a character Cooke can't overcome...her character is written to even force her own sister into participating in the spirit board game. To drag her boyfriend, sister, her bestie's beau, and a best friend into this spirit board game, understanding the danger of doing so, really places Laine in a negative light. I, like others I imagine, could do nothing but roll our eyes at Laine's activities. The film has the white-face, dark-circled eyes for the spirits. I think the look of the ghouls is quite similar to those you might see in Insidious, again stating that Ouija is just a flash in the pan October horror-fan bait film that will get a decent weekend then fade into oblivion. A drowning, hanging, head smash to a bathroom sink, and this weird possession are basically the methods for which the teens bite the dust. A constant in the film is the sewn mouth shut as it pertains to how Mother took care of her daughter (you see, the daughter used as a device for the spirits to occupy, the mother purposely allowing this to happen and paying the price for doing so). What begins "spirit takeover" scenes are when the eyes of victims go white. Not long after, the victims are toast. The scenes with the ghouls led to plenty of screams in the theatre by the teenagers in attendance, but for seasoned horror fans, they will induce chuckles (at those so overwhelmed by them). Cooke deserves better than this...she has acting chops (evidenced by her agony after the loss of her friend), but the girl needs gigs in the genre that do her justice. For Cooke, Ouija is a setback. However, the film does have two cool locations where Cooke goes into the spooky dark of old horror standbys: the attic and basement. Like Insidious Chapter 2 did, there's a hidden room, by way of a crawlspace in this film (unlike I part 2 which was behind a bookcase) where a corpse is found, held there for a reason. The attic, with only a flashlight as her lighting source, reveals photographs and a creepy doll (of course, this is a film that relies on what has worked in the genre in the past), including a spectre briefly seen (of course, provided just for a scare effect, nothing more). So, I guess the film will give you a minor few goosebumps and some moments where you await with breath tightening for the next loud sound blast followed by alive characters who happen to frighten their friends, but the plot is dull and not confident enough to give us anything all that creative to chew on. Skip it unless you just want to get in the theatre for some minor amusement.