Ouija (2014)

I suspected that this wasn't gonna be a classic when the official trailer repeatedly pronounced the title wrong. I'm a real mark for ouija board movies though, so you better believe that I was first in line to torrent this sucker the weekend after it came out. Besides, its only real competition during the 2014 Hallowe'en movie season was Annabelle, a flick that unabashedly glorifies the (thankfully) deceased Ed Warren (may his soul writhe in torment forever) and his hag, cunt wife Lorraine, who's due to join him any time now, at which point the world will be an infinitely better place. Given the choice between mediocre half-scares and supporting real-life filth like the Warrens, I'll take the former every time. I'm a supervillain, not a monster.

Honest-to-fuck monsters are out there though, just ask
the Warrens. Here's their 100% true account of a real-
life werewolf that they exorcised OMG totally for reals.

And to be fair, Ouija didn't quite deserve the ruthless rub-a-dub-drubbing it got from most critics. The first half, in fact, is pretty okay: it introduces (or at least perpetuates) some fun new ouija lore for middle school girls to try out at slumber parties ("If you look through the little window in the planchette, you can see the ghosts that are talking to you!"); a chick hangs herself with Christmas lights (Is it wrong that whenever a chick hangs herself in a movie, I'm secretly hoping for an upskirt shot?); there's your usual parade of semi-effective jump scares; and while you won't give a whit about the zero-dimensional characters you'll probably want to fuck at least one of them, which is almost as good. (Hell, that attitude got me through two marriages.) Unfortunately, after the one girl is levitated and dropped head first into her bathroom sink (apropos of nothing, she's wearing really cute socks when this happens) things start to bog down, with the remaining kids going all Mystery, Inc. in an attempt to figure out who's haunting them and why, which means research, and as we all learned in college, research is generally boring. Plus, like a lot of ghost movies, this one eventually reaches a point where the obvious solution is to simply burn the house down, which has the dual benefits of solving the problem once and for all while also being kinda fun. Hardly anyone ever does this though, preferring to run up and down the hallways, screaming like a bunch of imbeciles. The all-time ouija board movie champ remains 1986's Witchboard, starring a pre-deranged Tawny Kitaen's tits, but this one easily makes the top ten, assuming there even are ten ouija board movies, of course. I suppose I could look that up, but man, that really smacks of research. Fuck that shit.

Tawny Kitaen in Witchboard. Or possibly at home. Whatever.

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