Plot: When her best friend unexpectedly commits suicide, a teenage girl convinces her friends to use a Ouija board to make contact, but what they contact isn’t their friend and now they have to fight to live against something they cannot see.
I will just come out and say it, Ouija is a bad movie. It is completely unoriginal, uninspired and predictable from start to finish.
The star of the film is Olivia Cooke as Laine, whom you will recognize from the hit television show The Bates Motel. She is the smart, brainy one whose best friend Debbie (Shelley Hennig) has seemingly committed suicide, though we know better. Laine has zero visible emotions about her lifelong best friend dying, neither do any of her friends or Debbie’s boyfriend. My best friend moved over 1,300 miles away and I was inconsolable for days, but this girl’s best friend is dead and she doesn’t even shed a tear. There isn’t even a moment of anger about the whole thing. It’s just another day by her expression.
Determined that Debbie didn’t actually kill herself, Laine gathers together her cliché group of friends including her “bad girl” sister Sarah (Ana Coto), jock boyfriend Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), minority friend Isabelle (Bianca A. Santos) and Debbie’s dark and tortured boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith), and convinces them that using the Ouija board would be a neat way of contacting Debbie to get the truth of what happened.
So, they make contact with an entity that goes by “D” and assume it is Debbie because they conveniently have the same first initial. All they really get out of the ghost is “Hi Friend,” which each of them finds sporadically the next day whether it is carved into their desk, written on their window, typed on their computer or written on a wall in chalk. Naturally, no one seems spooked about it except Isabelle who they say doesn’t even want to leave her home, yet she is perfectly willing to come back the next night to use that Ouija board.
Of course, people have to die and each death is obnoxiously unoriginal. We have the bathroom death while the water is running in the tub, the evil entity in the bedroom and the ghost that lures someone to their death under the disguise of a trusted friend. Even after her friends start dying off, Laine shows no signs of sadness, just idiotic determination to keep using that board.
Then we have the pictures found in the attic of the previous home owners who did séances, which leads them to a family member in a mental institution, played by Lin Shaye, another unoriginal addition to the film. After that, we have The Ring moment where they think they are doing the right thing by releasing a ghost to rid the house of an evil entity but they are really releasing the evil and getting rid of the ghost that is trying to help them.
Even the ending is 100% transparent. Honestly, if you didn’t see every little bit of the movie coming, you have been living in a cave for the past twenty years. This movie rips off more than half a dozen other horror films including: The Ring, The Haunting in Connecticut, Mirrors, They, One Missed Call, and Boogeyman.
The absolute worst part of the film, beyond the unoriginality, is the acting. For years people bashed on Kristin Stewart for her lack of facial expressions. I honestly believe Olivia Cooke has put up some competition. Her happy, sad and frightened faces are exactly the same. I am not exaggerating in any way. I spent a good chunk of the movie trying to determine what her emotion was supposed to be in that moment but was left with nothing.
The character development in the film is atrocious. Laine’s sister Sarah is supposed to be a bad girl because she has black hair and sneaks out a couple of times with an older guy. Had they not just come out and told us that she was supposed to be the troublemaking sister, we would never have pegged her as such. She just looks like a teenage girl that listens to rock music. There really aren’t any moments for us to observe her being the bad girl beyond a single, and incredibly mild, teenage argument between the sisters.
We know Laine and Debbie have been best friends since childhood because of the opening sequence where they are using the Ouija board as small children and we know Trevor is Laine’s boyfriend because they have a single moment of actual connection at the beginning of the film, but Isabelle and Debbie’s boyfriend, Pete, really come out of nowhere. The initial introduction of Pete forces the viewer to just assume he was her boyfriend as they don’t just come out and say it for a while. Isabelle is their waitress at the diner they go to for breakfast before school, which really makes no sense as Isabelle is a friend and classmate of theirs. Honestly, what high school student waits tables before going to school early in the morning? It was just an incredibly lazy way to toss her into the mix.
The viewer has very little opportunity to connect with any of the characters to be upset over their deaths. In fact, almost everyone is so unlikable that you’re almost happy they are finally just gone. I just wish they would have had cooler and more satisfying deaths to balance it all out.
Every scare was a jump scare that you knew was coming. There was nothing to really instill fear in anyone. In fact, all that it made me want to do was go buy a Ouija board, the opposite effect the film should have had on me. Honestly, the scariest part of the film was the Insidious 3 preview before the actual film, which is funny since the ghosts in Ouija were horrible Insidious knockoffs.
I found myself checking the time more than once, only to find out that only fifteen minutes or so had passed since the last time I had checked. An hour and forty-five minutes of that movie felt like a boring lifetime. I honestly couldn’t get out of that theater fast enough, nor could the other sixteen people in the theater. Yes, there were only seventeen people in the theater on the second night of the film’s opening weekend in October, the weekend before Halloween. That should give you an indication of how bad it really was.
If you are thinking of going to see Ouija, please consider Witchboard or Sorority House Massacre 2 instead. They are not only fun Ouija board-based films, but will cost you less money and disappointment overall. Trust me; you will thank me in the end.
Rating: 3/10
===========================================================================================================================================
Ann Hale is the horror editor for Pop-Break.com and a senior contributing writer, reviewing horror movies and television shows. She is also the American Correspondent for Lovehorror.co.uk. Ann attended East Carolina University, majoring in English Literature. She is a collector of Halloween (the film) memorabilia and is a self-admitted opinionated horror nerd. You can follow her, her collection and her cat, Edward Kittyhands on Twitter and Instagram @Scarletjupiter
===========================================================================================================================================
Comments are closed.