Ouija (2014)

Movie Info

I see you!!!

When her friend Debbie Galardi (Shelley Hennig) kills herself, her best friend Laine Morris (Olivia Cooke) wants answers.  Using the Ouija board she finds at Debbie’s home, Laine, Debbie’s boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith), Laine’s sister Sarah (Ana Coto), their friend Isabelle (Bianca Santos), and Laine’s boyfriend Trevor (Daren Kagasoff) decide to contact Debbie…but get much more.  A woman called Mother (Claudia Katz Minnick) seems to haunt them and a girl named Doris Zander (Sierra Heuermann) could be the only way to stop her.

Directed by Stiles White, Ouija was produced by Hasbro and based on their name brand spirit board product.  The film was released to negative reviews but a strong box office return.

Burrito breath!!!

The fact that Ouija is a brand is rather sad.  The product was introduced in the 1890s and gained popularity in World War I…it just doesn’t seem too terrifying that something you can pick-up at Walmart could unlock the Gates of Hell…(of course Walmart could be the Gates of Hell to many).

Hasbro has set out to make many of their board games as movies including this and Battleship…it was already a stretch.  Ouija could have had potential, but instead, the makers tried to make the movie the blandest horror movie to appeal to the most people.  It has generic teens who are hunted and killed by a standard “bad hair girl” but the movie doesn’t even have very inspiring deaths.  It has twists that can be seen coming a mile away.

Hi…want to play?

The cast is also somewhat uninspired.  I enjoy Olivia Cooke in Bates Motel, but much of the rest of the cast is rather forgettable.  Cooke and the others aren’t memorable because the movie doesn’t allow them to be memorable with a rather dull script.  It could at least be boosted with some good jumps and scares.

I like the Doris Zander character of the movie when you finally get to see her, but even that character and the Mother character just feel like more of the same…unfortunately, the movie manufactures scares that feel like they should have been in a film at least ten years earlier.

Ouija is about as generic as you can get in the realm of horror.  If it was made in the 1990s, it might have been a little original, but here it feels like rehash of other teen horror films.  Despite the horrible reviews, money talks and a sequel Ouija:  Origins of Evil was release in 2016…to surprisingly good reviews.

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Ouija:  Origin of Evil (2016)