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.

Holds your interest throughout though it's not on a par with, say, Hell House. The cast is attractive and capable and the effects pretty good. The main reason to watch is Ana Coto, a young actress as full of charm as a peach is full of sweetness. If I had my way she'd be a star.

After the death of her best friend Debbie (Shelley Hennig) that committed suicide, Laine (Olivia Cooke) brings her sister Sarah (Ana Coto) and convinces her friends Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), Isabelle (Bianca Santos) and Pete (Douglas Smith) to perform a séance using a Ouija board. However they unleash evil spirits that threat them.

"Ouija" is unoriginal movie even in the title since there are many "Ouija" movies. I do not recall how many movies that I have seen with the same storyline, where a group of teens or even adults that use a Ouija board or a séance to accidentally awake evil spirits. The story is boring, the acting of Olivia Cooke is weak for a lead actress and the screenplay does not help. The plot point of this forgettable movie does not have anything special. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Ouija: O Jogo dos Espíritos" ("Ouija: The Game of the Spirits")

"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".

This movie never had a chance of being good - it's a modern horror movie based on a board game. Still, it could have been campy fun. After all, it is a board game. But no, Ouija is not fun. It's very, very boring.

Everything about this movie fails on so many levels. The writing doesn't have a single original or interesting idea, and it doesn't even make sense in the end. The acting is dull, though that's largely due to the fact that our characters spend the majority of the film moping around their houses and at school. There's no way of gaining momentum of suspense when nothing is happening. The characters play the board game a couple times and there are a handful of cheap jump scares and bad effects. That's it. The direction is flat and indifferent. Worst of all, it's not scary in the least.

Ouija is the absolute bare minimum for a horror movie, completely devoid of energy, inspiration, and any interest in telling an original story.