Ouija is by-the-numbers horror leading nowhere

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OCT. 23, 2014

By Steve Newton

I remember Ouija. When I was a kid in the late ’60s my older sister would use our “weegee board” to try to conduct séances and communicate with the dead. I was never into it. “Leave the dead alone,” was my motto. Plus, I didn’t have much faith in a parlour game that you could cheat so effectively with.

There’s also a fair amount of cheating involved in the new teen-oriented horror flick, Ouija, in that you’ll feel ripped off if you pay anything to see it.

The movie opens with a suspenseless prologue showing two little girls playing with a Ouija board, then switches to the present to show that the braver of the two has developed into a blonde hottie (Shelley Hennig) who still likes to fiddle with the heart-shaped planchette.

But she breaks the rules by playing it alone, picks up some bad vibes from the malevolent spirits in her old house, and winds up dangling from a string of Christmas lights.

Cue the heartbreak of BFF Laine (Olivia Cooke), who tries to get to the bottom of the shocking suicide, dragging her boyfriend, sister, and a couple of others along to another spirit-board session, with predictable ghost-summoning results.

First-time director Stiles White kills a ton of time filming the photogenic teens creeping ever-so-slowly up dingy staircases to the tedious strains of a generic scary-movie soundtrack.

Things pick up somewhat when Laine visits one of the former occupants of the house, a wheelchair-ridden mental patient played by Lin Shaye, the weirdo spiritualist from Insidious and Insidious: Chapter 2 and probably Insidious: Chapter 3.

But everything else leading up to Ouija’s predictable climax is gimmicky safe, by-the-numbers horror, whether it’s shreiking sound-effects, mouths sewn shut, gas stoves mysteriously flaring on, or people getting dragged along the floor and out of shot by invisible forces.

Man am I sick of seeing people getting dragged out of shot by invisible forces.

To read more than 350 of my reviews of horror movies released theatrically in North America between 1988 and 2018, go here.