This year’s newest Halloween flick, “Ouija” will make viewers jump in their seats, scream in front of their dates and walk away from the theater shaking their heads, saying, “I totally saw that coming.”
Directed by Stiles White and starring the gorgeous Olivia Cooke (“The Signal”) and heartthrob Daren Kagasoff (“The Secret Life of the American Teenager”), “Ouija” tells the story of a girl (Shelly Hennig, “Days of Our Lives”) who wakes spirits through an ouija board. Since she is now on the angry spirits’ hit list, she predictably dies. Her friend (Cooke) takes up the hobby with her good-looking chums in an effort to make supernatural contact with her friend, only to contract said angry spirits herself.
The spirits then haunt them for, essentially, the rest of the movie. At first, they are remarkably polite, writing “Hi Friend” on car windows and desks, until they suddenly aren’t so nice. The spirits pull off a few predictable, spooky moments that make the movie theatre audience groan. “Really?” the reaction might go. “You’re being haunted and still you are going to do something our mothers warned us about doing, or something people always get killed doing in scary movies*?”
While the audience collectively jumps, they lack any real love for the characters. After all, they are the same characters that have been victims in horror movies since the birth of the genre. Main protagonist Laine Morris (Cooke) and her buddies seem to be based on the characters in the “Scary Movie” series, looking way too old to be in high school, just dumb teanagers, at it again.
If there’s anything good about “Ouija”, it’s that some moments are really scary. The movie is jumpy, just as any decent scary movie should be. It also has a heartwarming moral to never play with Ouija boards (unless violent apparitions are your thing). That being said, “Ouija” is not unique or unprecedented in any way. To watch “Ouija” on a budget, just consult any previous campy teenager Friday night horror flicks on Netflix. While the specifics might differ a bit, the essence is the same.
“Ouija” (PG-13, 89 min) opens in theaters nationwide on Oct. 24.
