Ouija

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 was by no means a cinematic masterpiece, however can you really expect something of such high quality when the entire premise is based around a Ouija board that wreaks havoc upon a group of close friends.

Watching this film, my desire to watch a somewhat corny and predictable horror/thriller was achieved with ease. As someone who has been warned time and time again about the dangers of using supernatural means to attempt to contact the dead, I found this movie to be highly entertaining in a cheap-thrills kind of way.

If you are looking for a simple, cliché supernatural themed movie to watch with close friends for a movie night, I'd definitely recommend. This movie is neither terribly unbearable nor disgustingly gory, and as such I feel is relatively inoffensive to those who enjoy these themes in their movies.

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".

Okay...so. Normally when you see a PG-13 horror movie come out, it's either going to totally suck, or rock. This movie was actually, in the middle. It did not suck and it did not rock. *It was basically a mixture of Insidious and Final Destination.* The scares in the movie were typically those corny jump-scares, but I have to say, they weren't bad. (Or really that good, either.) The thing about PG-13 horror movies is that they aren't really that scary at all. This movie was alright, I wouldn't say scary, but it would be enough to scare a little kid because of the loud noises and scary images. The story is okay. It kind of gets better and worse and better and worse. In the beginning, the story is declining, getting worse and worse, because of all the cliché and disappointing climaxes. Then, it sort of gets better... and then back down to really bad. Then, in the second half of the movie, it starts to get really, really, intense and actually good. When you think it's over, it isn't. But when it is over, you wouldn't think that was the end. The acting was.. okay? In the beginning the acting totally STANK! I mean, it was really fake. But it got better and better as the movie progressed. The main character, Laine (Olivia Cooke) did an okay job of acting. She was the type in the movie that was sort of dumb, but in the end turned out to be a bit clever. All the things in the movie that happen are mostly things that you'd expect to happen. The special effects really were disappointing, when the monster/entity (not revealing any more than that) is shown, WOW are the effects SO FAKE.

Lastly, don't let reviews change your mind about a movie. They are simply opinions. Just because this movie has under average ratings doesn't mean that you will automatically think this movie will and always will stink. Don't always look at the negative sides of a movie. :) And also, be careful. On my trip for watching this movie, there was a young delinquent cracking jokes to his "encouraging" friends, disrupting the full experience, so I may have missed some good parts of the movie.