You’ll be “board” to death with “Ouija”

Paranormal activity in horror movies has been around since dinosaurs learned how to procreate, and while it usually works in creating an unnerving atmosphere, sometimes it only creates a stuffy one. “Ouija” came out recently and definitely lacked sufficient ventilation.The movie starts with two little girls playing with an Ouija board: which begs the questions, where are their parents? Who is allowing them to play with a magic demon board that people believe to be possessed by evil spirits? Soon after, the movie shifts to one of these girls, named Debbie, all grown up, sitting in front of a fire and dramatically gasping while the Ouija board sits beside her. She puts the cursor on “goodbye” and tosses the board into the fire. When she heads back to her cliché girl’s room, decorated in pictures of her friends and family as well as the word “love” on paper, she discovers that the board has risen from the dead and sits on her bed. Foolishly, she looks through the cursor and her eyes goes white. Then she drags Christmas lights from her room and hangs herself.As expected, this movie is jump-scare central. This intro is just one example of the ways that this film tries to spook the skeleton out of you and instead slips on a banana peel. Over the course of the movie, there were about three times when I personally went “oh boy” and slightly moved in my seat due to discomfort.So Debbie is dead and her friends attend her funeral, looking “distraught.” The acting here isn’t even funny or campy in the same vein as lower budget horror media like Resident Evil or Evil Dead, as I was genuinely unsure of what to feel for these characters. It’s almost as if they hired five very good looking boards as their leads and decided to let the boards do their own thing, which was be boards. After the funeral these good looking boards decide to play with the ouija board and then one after the other they are turned into sawdust (not really, they just die in moronic ways) by a ghost. Special effects in this movie were decent, so I’ll give it credit for that. An example of one good special effect was a certain scene where one of the girls convincingly hits her head on the sink, and I don’t think they could have made that look more real if they had her actually slam her face on the edge. I would’ve liked to see that.The plot was all over the place and apparently two twists isn’t enough for a C-grade horror movie, so they had to have three. The third and final twist turns out to reveal that the ghost is killing dead Debbie’s friends because it was trying to stop the other ghost from killing them. This twist is revealed in the trailer anyway so it isn’t a spoiler, just a warning that watching the trailer is better than watching the actual movie. I guess maybe the screenwriters thought they could cover up their inability to write a good movie by having fine looking wooden boards be their stars.In the end, it’s nothing special. It’s the same generic drivel that plagues most films of this genre. While I’ll give it credit for spooking me once or twice with a loud noise, other great movies can use the shock factor to disturb and unnerve a viewer yet this one decides loud musical cues and noises are the way to go. Ouija does nothing more than provide another blank plastic cube of gray to the ever increasing pile. You could also say it’s another blank board to add to the pile of boards.jlobos@thesamohi.com