552: Ouija

[00:00:01] Let's get to our first bonus review, which is Ouija from 2014.

[00:00:10] It's directed by Stiles White, stars Olivia Cooke, Anna Koto, Darren Cagasoff, Bianca A. Santos, Douglas Smith.

[00:00:23] And the synopsis is, Terror awaits five friends who unwittingly awaken a dark power by using an antique Ouija board.

[00:00:35] This one wasn't really on my watch list. My main reason for doing it is I wanted to watch Ouija Origin of Evil because it's directed by Mike Flanagan.

[00:00:48] Going in, I knew that it got pretty bad reviews across the board, both critically on Letterboxd. It has a pretty bad rating as well.

[00:01:00] I really don't think it's that bad. I've seen much more offensively bad mainstream jump scare horror films than this.

[00:01:08] The main problem I had was that the entire thing is just a little too bland, a little too vanilla in all fronts.

[00:01:20] It is surprisingly well shot. The direction is solid.

[00:01:27] I have no complaints about the performances. I really like Olivia Cooke. She was in Sound of Metal and Ready Player One.

[00:01:38] And there was no one obnoxious in it from a writing standpoint either.

[00:01:44] The story was simple. The editing and everything kept it fairly cohesive. I was never lost.

[00:01:52] However, there was nothing that really wowed me. There was nothing that really stuck, that hit me emotionally, or that was that funny.

[00:02:03] The jump scares... I'm glad it was not as jump scare heavy as I thought it would be.

[00:02:08] But there wasn't enough other elements of horror or mood to make up for that.

[00:02:16] I appreciated that for most of the runtime, obviously the Ouija board stuff is, you know, out there.

[00:02:23] But for a lot of the runtime, it tried to keep itself mainly in a reality.

[00:02:30] It was only more so in the third act when things became bigger and very supernatural front and center.

[00:02:38] The third act, what I found to be most interesting was this investigation of, okay, what happened in this house?

[00:02:46] Why is this family cursed or why are they haunting these people through the use of this Ouija board?

[00:02:54] There were the scenes of Olivia Cooke going to see the sister who's still alive at the asylum.

[00:03:01] But that investigation only started with about 20 minutes left.

[00:03:07] For that first two thirds or so, it's a very slow burn, needlessly slow burn of each of these teenagers being picked off by the cursed Ouija board.

[00:03:22] The climax is just them going into this basement, Olivia Cooke using the Ouija board and seemingly destroying the spirits.

[00:03:35] I did like the look of the undead spirit girl coming out of the crawl space and putting her hand on Olivia Cooke's.

[00:03:45] The twist of the sister actually lying about it being the mother who was causing all of the problems.

[00:03:52] It was actually the sister who was evil.

[00:03:55] I thought that was interesting and that got me.

[00:03:59] Maybe I'm in the minority, but I believed what she said when they had that first meeting and like,

[00:04:04] Oh yeah, the mother's crazy and she did this and did that to my sister and she's terrible.

[00:04:09] You got to take her down.

[00:04:10] But that was all a lie.

[00:04:14] The score was good.

[00:04:16] A very easy, quiet piano.

[00:04:20] The opening scene of the girl committing suicide by hanging herself with the Christmas lights or the holiday lights, whatever they are, and falling down off the stairway.

[00:04:34] The look of the characters when they have their mouths sewn shut.

[00:04:38] I thought that was a pretty creepy image.

[00:04:43] All in all, you know, if you're desperate for a watchable horror film that you can just have on in the background and look up and be marginally entertained and a few scares here and there, it does the job.

[00:04:55] I don't ever feel the need to rewatch it again.

[00:05:00] If they want to continue this series, I think there are worse ones out there that get way more sequels than this one does.

[00:05:08] So by all means.

[00:05:10] But if you're wanting to watch origin of evil, that is a prequel.

[00:05:14] So you don't necessarily have to watch this one to have an understanding of that story.

[00:05:19] You could just start and end with that one.

[00:05:22] That is a light two and a half out of five.

[00:05:28] There's the 20-year-old commission from the beginning of the day that you're never going to return?

[00:05:28] I don't think about it, but I especially think it's a pretty long way right now.

[00:05:28] There's a couple topics that say nothing about the whole story.

[00:05:28] If you're working on the other side of the story, don't seem to read out the same way.