Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
Issue link: https://www.epageflip.net/i/414441
NOVEMBER 12-18, 2014 UCW 21 WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM I'm not sure if the most horrifying part of this "horror" movie is how terrible it is or that it managed to make number one at the box office opening weekend. If Jennifer Lawrence can star in The House at the End of the Street and still have her amazing career, I guess Olivia Cooke (Bates Motel) can star in Ouija (89 minutes) and go on to make actual movies instead of ridiculous, poorly written, clichéd, D-Level, underwritten, badly acted pieces of garbage. Granted, it did not have a lot of competition. The absence of horror movies left the door open for Ouija, though in any other market it would be a direct-to-DVD if not a basic cable midnight movie. I was hoping that the week before Halloween would see some great unanticipated indie release gaining momentum in the absence of bigger budget mainstream horror movies, or at least an interesting sequel to an established franchise like Insidious or Sinister, but no go. The film begins by establishing that girls like the color pink, sleepovers and dabbling in the dark arts with a Ouija board game. The girls in the opener grow up to be Laine (Cooke) and Debbie (Shelley Hennig). Debbie and Laine have a conversation before Laine leaves her clearly disturbed friend alone in a dark house to attend a basketball game. Moments later, (Spoiler Alert) Debbie hangs herself using the Christmas lights that decorate her room. Thoughtfully, someone later restores the string of lights to the dead girl's room, since they are clearly seen in later scenes throughout the movie. Perhaps it was the ghost of continuity, which clearly died during the filming of this rubbish. Laine, in need of some major counseling, clings to the notion that she can talk to her dead friend if she follows the stupidest Ouija rules in the world made up by her and Debbie when they were kids. She drags her sister Sarah (Ana Coto) over to Debbie's house along with her boyfriend Trevor (Daren Kagasoff ), Dead Debbie's boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith) and their friend Isabelle (Bianca A. Santos). Since Debbie's parents are on an extended vacation, the group has no trouble repeatedly breaking into the suicide house and wandering around for hours on end at will, screaming, breaking mirrors and checking out both the spooky attic and the spookier basement. Good thing the neighbors are deaf/don't have the number for 911 handy. Laine believes that she has successfully contacted Debbie, until the ghost torments them in subtle ways, like writing them ghost messages to say hi, bashing Peter on the head and staging unnecessarily complicated manifestations. The plot is going nowhere fast when the crack investigative team discovers that a child living in the house went missing decades before, her surviving sister (Lin Shaye) promptly killed their mother before being sent to a local insane asylum. Quick, raise your hand if your small town is big enough to host a fully staffed home for the criminally insane! Keep your hand up if strangers can wander in and out at will simply by claiming to be the relative of a convicted murderer with no surviving family! Things only get stupider at this point, with Laine's grandmother sitting in as the spiritual adviser (for some reason, to be decided later). Overall, you don't need to consult a Ouija board to know that this film got it wrong in every way possible, though you might ask which producer sold their soul to the devil in order to get this pile of bad decisions filmed. Avoid wasting time and save money by watching some Spanish language horror on Netflix instead. Now showing at Wynnsong 7, Market Fair 15 and Carmike 12. Planchette Just Spelled B-A-D Ouija (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer. COMMENTS? Editor@ upandcomingweekly.com. 910.484.6200.