Following the mysterious death of her best friend Debbie (Shelley Hennig), Laine (Olivia Cooke) finds an old Ouija board in Debbie’s room and wants to use it to try to say goodbye. To help her, she enlists her and Debbie’s friends Trevor, Sarah, Isabelle, and Pete (Daren Kagasoff, Ana Coto, Bianca A. Santos, and Douglas Smith) to try to communicate with Debbie with the board. Instead of contacting Debbie, they find someone else. Now she and her friends must discover this spirit’s past and to close the portal they’ve opened in order for them to not suffer its fate.
When I heard about this film near the end of last year, I thought it had a lot of potential based on the subject matter. But it turned out to be a vanilla/PG-13 (I use these terms interchangeably) horror movie. If you think watching people sit at a table is exciting, than this film is for you. I just wished it could have gone further in many areas. I personally did not find this film very scary which disappointed me but I was not surprised considering what I knew about the film. This is what happens when the film is marketed for a YA/tween audience. I guess it didn’t want to alienate them. I think they are better than that. I found the story rather predictable where I was able to guess what happened next most of the time. I also found that the film skimmed over a few things story-wise which meant just having to accept things that are thrown at you and it suffers from many underdeveloped characters such as all of them. I never really cared about any of the characters so I wasn’t too emotionally invested in them either. In my opinion, good horror movie have a few characters that are developed to the point that you become emotionally invested and care about what happens to them so we get scared with them because we believe that something bad is about to happen to them. They also have characters that we tend to not care as much about because they need people to kill off. I never got to learn too much about any of the characters so I didn’t care about what happened to them and I will not spoil what happens but I will say that it did not do enough. Also the film was too short in that another 15 minutes could have done it some good. The end was pointless because it tried to hint at a sequel which is unnecessary and will probably not happen judging by how poorly the film did at the box office. Its a shame that the film was marketed to a younger audience because if it could have gone a little darker and dived a little deeper into the subject matter then the film could have been decent.
Score: 6/10
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The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.