La ouija: El juego de los espíritus

A random group of young adults who are some combination of roommates/friends takes time out from their busy partying schedule to play with an improvised Ouija board, when they accidentally call forth a djinn who tells them that they will all die.

Long Time Dead is quite a mess, made all the more frustrating by occasional flashes of competence. It couldn't have helped that that a veritable army of writers--seven credited in all--worked on the story and script, including director Marcus Adams.

After a brief prologue set in the late 1970s in Morocco which was far more promising than most of the film proper, we begin meeting our bloated cast of heroes. There are eight of them, maybe all living in the same building or apartment, except for Lucy (Marsha Thomason), who appears to be living on a boat near the building. If I sound unsure, it's because Adams is not able to clearly establish the characters, their relationships to one another, or the relationships of one location to another. It doesn't help that a few of the five males look alike, and they all dress alike. Neither does it help that as the film progresses, various characters arbitrarily appear and disappear for random lengths of time. That fact is indicative of the pacing problems that plague the film on many levels.

It's not often very clear why any characters are doing whatever they happen to be doing at a given moment. Most of the plot seems like an excuse to put characters in very stereotypical horror/thriller scenarios, where they slowly walk around an environment frightened, becoming startled in various ways until finally some unseen thing kills them. These scenes are often competent, and occasionally they're good, but in the context of the film, they have little dramatic impact. Much of Long Time Dead plays more like a sample reel of "scare scenes"; it has little coherency as a story.

A big problem is that the chief villain is never clearly shown, explained or given any rules to follow. For most of the film, the villain is invisible. Invisible villains are usually a problem, and often indicate deficiencies in budget and/or imagination. Oddly, by the end, there is a concrete villain and the film has devolved into a fairly stock thriller, where we have to guess whom the possessed cast member is.

Although the story has promise, and the ending is somewhat of an improvement, even though it never rises above the cliché, Long Time Dead is too burdened with severe flaws in direction, cinematography (the film is frequently far too dark) and performances to merit a recommendation. I ended up granting a 4 (equivalent to a "high F" letter grade) because of the adequacy of some of the "scare" and death scenes, the good ideas in the backstory, and the slightly more engaging climax. The film would have been much better if the prologue and the subsequent events with Becker and the one character's father who ended up in a mental institution had been the focus, but alas, it was not to be. Let's hope Adams fares better the next time around.

In the 1960's the Hammer Horrorr films helped to almost single handedly revitalised the british film industry - but lately we haven't seen much Horror (film wise) coming out of the UK. Long Time Dead tries to recify this with mixed results. Though not brilliant and lacking a lot of the audicity of the Hammer films, as well as the eerie spookiness of the lastets supernatural hits - THE OTHERS and SIXTH SENSE, Long Time Dead does manage a few tense moments - nothing overly scarey mind you but I didn't hate it.

The trouble is it is trying to follow an American formula - a group of teenagers fooling around with the supernatural unleash something terrible and most of them die as a result.

It also has the now mandatory - "it's not really over" ending.

That said it is okay and fans thirsty for a bit of spooky old fashioned horror/supernatural/teenage thriller will probably enjoy it.

Just as an aside I recommend viewers who did enjoy this or who are interested in the Demon DJIN which features in this film would enjoy WishMaster - the Wes Craven film. It is far more bloody and violent but the Djin is also much more developed.

LONG TIME DEAD

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Sound format: Dolby Digital

During a Ouija session, several drunken teenagers summon a djinn which proceeds to kill them, one by one.

Though clearly influenced by American horror movies, LONG TIME DEAD finds an echo in Michael Armstrong's UK thriller THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF HORROR (1969), in which bored teenagers inadvertently sparked the wrath of a deadly killer - in Armstrong's film, the villain was an all-too-human maniac, whereas Marcus Adams' updated version unleashes the forces of supernatural terror on its hapless protagonists. Alec Newman (from the TV remake of DUNE) is the unofficial leader of the group, whose father (Michael Feast) was involved in similar jiggery-pokery many years earlier, leading to several deaths witnessed by Newman as a child.

The movie opened in UK theaters to scathing reviews and dismal box-office, and while the artless, multi-authored screenplay wanders aimlessly from scene to scene (the curse of so many modern horror films), it isn't nearly as bad as various reviews have suggested. Performances are uniformly fine (particularly Newman as the damaged young man forced to come to terms with his father's terrible legacy, and former soap star Joe Absolom as a potential victim), and Adams stages the various set-pieces with brisk precision, building to a fiery showdown between Newman and the unstoppable monster. The narrative makes little sense, but the movie is efficient and watchable, and amounts to passable popcorn entertainment, nothing more or less.

The attempt to bring the ouija board theme to a movie sounds good idea, and the first 10 minutes are kind of scary. There was so much potentinal at the beginning of the movie, sadly it fails. The plot is nothing new, it couldn't scare even if taken seriously, the directing is good at some point, but as we can't see the "djinn" until the end we can't get scared in the death scenes. The good thing about the movie is the acting, and I could say the effective score. The ending is quite good that's all I can say about it.

"Long Time Dead" is recommended for recent fans of the horror genre, even though it failed to promote the horror genre of the new century. Watch it for some fun!

I am surprised at the mixed views on this film. Reading the back cover I knew it was a gamble but it paid off.

I watched it without any hype or recommendation, and thought it was a pretty good film.

Someone rated it 2/10. Has this person seem some of the rubbish horror films in the video store.

I thought the acting was very good. A welcome relief from some of the American garbage.

7/10