Review of Ouija (2014) by John M — 07 Jun 2015

Earlier this year, I saw a new horror film called It Follows. I'ts nice to get a solid horror movie amidst a pile of feces. Guillermo del Toro's, Crimson Peak hits theaters later this year as well. Nowadays, most horror movies are sh*t. Just when I think, maybe they'll get better, they get much worse. Films based on board games have been made before. Needless to say, most of them have been horrible. I can remember the classic Robin Williams film, Jumanji. Well, now we have a new one. "Ouija" is directed by Stiles White, and it's based on the board game of the same name. Frankly, it doesn't matter who stars in the film.

The story is-in is much detail as I can give-a girl plays the Ouija board and dies. Her parents find her hanging in their home. The first ten minutes are bearable. It wasn't great, but it set up everything plain enough. A girl hangs herself and all of her friends have to figure it out. Well, this doesn't last long. They go to the house, feel a presence, and assume it's their friend. Obviously, they have to use the board, and obviously they have to play in the house of their dead friend. Obviously, there are endless jump scares, none of which are scary. Obviously, the acting is really bad.

I certainly wasn't expecting grade A performances, but these kids were awful. If there was one decent performance, it came from Olivia Cooke. Surprisingly, she was actually really good. Everyone else was a complete brick, especially Douglas Smith. None of the characters are memorable, none of them are interesting.

I want to touch on the "horror" aspects of the film. The director has no idea how to make a horror film. While certain scary images are somewhat decent, and certain character deaths are sort of effective, they kill it with the incessant jump scares. A good horror film doesn't use this many jump scares. Personally, I have found the best horror films build tension slowly throughout themselves. When you use jump scares constantly, it makes the experience less scary, and more annoying. I was able to predict almost every single jump scare, before it happened. Some of them weren't even scary. Some idiot would yell or come around a corner making a loud noise. Sometimes a kid would drop something, or shut a door to hard. It was so predictable, not to mention boring as hell.

"Ouija" is a film based on a board game. If that's not enough to get you uninterested, stay tuned for the final verdict. If there was one redeeming feature in this movie, it was the beautiful cinematography. Aside from this, everything was crass. The acting was garbage, the dialogue and script were juvenile, and it wasn't scary. Sure, some of the scares-maybe two of them-worked fine. It was just a drag from start to finish. At least it wasn't as horrible as A Haunted House 2.