OUIJA: Bored Game

Director: Stiles White
Writers: Stiles White, Juliet Snowden
Cast: Olivia Cooke, Ana Coto, Daren Kagasoff, Bianca A. Santos, Douglas Smith, Shelley Hennig, Sierra Heuermann
Runtime: 89 mins.
2014

Ouija is a movie in which you get to watch characters floss on two separate occasions. Ouija is also rare in that 80% of its title is comprised of vowels. I'm stretching for interesting factoids, but I've quickly run dry. There are probably about twenty collective seconds of good movie in here somewhere?

Ouija belongs to the unfortunate pantheon of films based on board games, so the creative team should be given a bit of leeway for being shackled to that premise. It's unclear whether director Stiles White and co-writer Juliet Snowden shat out the quickest most slapdash film that would still satisfy their corporate overlords, or whether they were actively trying to subvert their thankless task by crafting the most unappealingly cliched movie they could muster. Either way Ouija amounts to a feature length toy commercial, even going so far as having a character toss out the plasticine line, "They sell these things at toy stores," as if it were pertinent to the spooky situation. Indeed, the game is so lazily mythologized that the characters rattle off the sacred rulebook by memory, and are punished mightily for breaking them.

The central idea of the film is so basic as to barely be considered an idea at all: What if that board game people use to fake talk to ghosts actually let you for real talk to ghosts? From there it's all backwards engineering contrivances in order to get five beautiful high schoolers (by all appearances in their mid-twenties) to play the dread game together, thus opening some sort of channel between themselves and a child spirit who calls herself DZ. The game has already claimed their friend's life, and now it seeks to claim theirs as well.

Basically evil spirits use the Ouija board to communicate, but also to just generally take control of the characters. Once the conduit is open, the bad spirits can do such things as: make their eyes turn white, sew their mouths shut, make them float, and make them kill themselves. If that doesn't make too much sense, remember that I am just your humble messenger. I don't claim to understand it either. Is that particular Ouija board cursed, or does it just happen to be in a cursed house? If the spirit can have complete control over people, why not just kill them immediately? Why draw it out over the course of countless scenes that involve doors slowly opening, or stove burners suddenly igniting? If the spirit sees the kids as a threat, why not just wipe them out? What's the end goal anyway? Survival? World domination?

For a film that never clarifies its central conflict, and indeed seems foggy on every narrative element it features, it sure delivers a ton of exposition. Most horror flicks top out at one or two awkwardly constructed expository scenes, but Ouija manages to stuff in at least four. Firstly we get a flashback with the sole function of younger versions of the main characters explaining the rules of the game for our benefit. Later on we get a hilariously convenient found footage flash drive of the dead friend first encountering the titular board. Then there's the DZ demon's all grown up sister, now in an insane asylum, but more than happy to explain exactly how these evil spirits work. And finally we get a hasty infodump leading into the final conflict courtesy of the token ambiguously ethnic medium, who I think is also one of the character's grandmother, but the movie doesn't care enough to make that clear so why should I.

The plotting is an abysmal pile of contrivances whose only tactic for covering its idiocy is to simply move onto the next line of dialogue. It is a doomed tactic, as the dialogue is perhaps the most contrived of all. I'm pretty sure a character at a diner asks for a refill on his "bean juice." Honestly I mentioned earlier that these folks are supposed to be teenagers in high school, but despite plenty of scenes being set at their school, I doubt myself every time I make that assertion. It's not just the advanced age of the actors, it's the way they speak like twenty-five year old robots who were linguistically programmed by downloading every garbage ghost/slasher movie and taking the average of all the dialogue. This movie is packed with plenty of tragedy--the death of lifelong friends, romantic partners, etc.--but by the very next scene the characters are speaking in that distinctly clinical manner that bad horror characters use whilst discussing their supernatural predicaments.

Let's not forget that this is an issue with the acting as well. There are some truly bizarre moments in what is otherwise trying to be a polished studio affair when actors invent novel pronunciations for what should be relatively simple words; you'd think the filmmakers ran out of reels and so had to use the nonsense take.

In summation, this kind of po-faced idiocy is either good for a lark, or brainbleedingly boring depending on your mood. It's too PG-13 studio competent to be as watchable as something like Troll 2 or any of the business you might find on Mystery Science Theater 3000, but I can see a certain kind of person really jiving with the slick corporate cruelty on display here. At least I would hope that to be the case, as the movie is a loooong 89 minutes. It even has the gall to resolve its conflict with a climactic setpiece, then unresolve the conflict with a twist that has us trod through the very same climactic setpiece once more. A great deal of this film feels like the filmmakers were struggling to pad the story in an effort to reach feature length, which feels appropriate for the adaptation of a game that was only ever good for a solid five minutes of screwing around with your friends. On the one hand, the commercial nature of Ouija is vile, but on the other you kind of have to admire a movie that tries to get people to buy a board game by punishing its characters horribly for playing said game.

0 / 5  BLOBS