Ouija - Spiel nicht mit dem Teufel

Horror is one of those genres that creates such voting and reviewing hostility on internet sites. You can guarantee that no matter what new horror film comes out it will garner posts on the likes of IMDb as being "the worst horror film I have ever seen". That is until the next big release, where we will go around the houses again...

Ouija is just a standard boo-jump horror picture with a standard story line. Any expectation of any thing more would have (will do) led (lead) to great disappointment. It's one of those horror films that asks you to turn off the lights and just enjoy the quick spooky ride, then you get off the ride and quickly move on to something else. It's neither "the worst horror film of all time" or anything remotely original. It's Boo-Jump horror 101, so buy into that or leave it well alone. 6/10

In recent times, never has a horror film centered entirely around the Ouija board game, and perhaps for good reason - it is a bit too foolish to be believable.

Ouija boards have been utilized in horror films countless times before, as a last ditch effort to communicate with a disturbed spirit on the other side when a medium led seance is out of the question. 2014's horror film Ouija instead puts the cause and focus of the strange disturbances directly upon the game itself.

After one of their friends inexplicably is found dead in a suspected suicide, a group of friends turn toward her Ouija board in a desperate attempt to find answers and closure. When it appears a communication channel has been opened with the dead things take a dark and unsettling turn.

Stiles White co-writes and directs this painfully formulaic film. What audiences should expect to get from Ouija is your classic 'strange occurrences, oh no people dying, let's investigate to uncover the truth to hopefully appease the spirits'. While formulas typically exist because on some level they do work, this one has been bludgeoned to boredom inducing death.

Typically if a film is going to be this standard then some sort of redeemable part of it must shine through, either through stellar characters portrayed by undiscovered gems or uniquely gruesome horror scenes. Ouija is a film that opens incredibly weakly, like a rough cut that should have been a reshoot. Once the group of friends, led by up-and-coming horror queen Olivia Cooke, make contact through the Ouija board the terrifying scenes considerably improve but never prove wow-worthy and still border on cliché.

The most substantial error in the entirety of the film is the overall serious tone. The teenage high school students are all a bit too earnest when it comes to using a Ouija board. Stiles and his co-screenplay writer Juliet Snowden just really have no idea how to write realistically for teen youths. There is no humor or sarcasm, no sass and no disbelief when one of the friends approaches the other to use the Ouija board.

Teens, even in the event that one kills him or herself, use humor as a coping mechanism. if one of my friends said 'we need to talk to ____ on the other side' I would laugh in his or her face from the ludicrous nature of the proposition.

Further everything that propels the story forward in Ouija is a bit far-fetched. Most of the teens are incredibly serious about dental hygiene, with several scenes featuring them flossing. The adults all must have minored in Paranormal Occurrences and How to Deal with It. Overall Ouija was not scary and the extenuating circumstances surrounding the plot were laughable at best.

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"Ouija" has a pretty cool and creepy story to work with, an old spirit board discovered in the attack, suicides and haunting, a creepy legend that connects the board to the house of the suicide girl, it is all perfect horror subject matter. Unfortunately there is something missing from "Ouija" that makes it more spectacle than horror. The scenes build nicely through suspense, shadowy, eerie atmosphere, and great sound effects, but the end result falls flat. The big scares aren't really scary.

The cast give well enough performances of these haunted characters. The direction and cinematography are equally stellar. You can tell money was well spend in production, "Ouija" has all the right components to be a real good horror film, unfortunately it all stays pretty PG. The horror seems almost pulled back into safer zones when they should have took that thrilling momentum and gone for some major scares. Not sure why they chose to keep things subdued. I mean really for what "Ouija" is it is a nice, creepy Halloween horror film based on an occult staple-the spirit board. And there are a few scare-ish moments that use the sudden shock gimmick to get a jump out of the movie-goer but still this film is far less exciting than say "Insidious" or "The Conjuring".

A door closing. An eye changing colour. Another door closing. If any of these things frighten you, you'll still find Ouija boring.

The acting is wooden (even from the usually good Olivia Cooke), every plot development is telegraphed and predictable, and the whole thing reads like a first draft full of placeholder dialogue.

After watching it, I was completely unsurprised to find that half the film had been re-shot and the last 20 minutes completely added from scratch.

It's a film with no scares, no good dialogue, no interesting ideas, nothing at all. It's completely and totally vacuous.

This movie never had a chance of being good - it's a modern horror movie based on a board game. Still, it could have been campy fun. After all, it is a board game. But no, Ouija is not fun. It's very, very boring.

Everything about this movie fails on so many levels. The writing doesn't have a single original or interesting idea, and it doesn't even make sense in the end. The acting is dull, though that's largely due to the fact that our characters spend the majority of the film moping around their houses and at school. There's no way of gaining momentum of suspense when nothing is happening. The characters play the board game a couple times and there are a handful of cheap jump scares and bad effects. That's it. The direction is flat and indifferent. Worst of all, it's not scary in the least.

Ouija is the absolute bare minimum for a horror movie, completely devoid of energy, inspiration, and any interest in telling an original story.