First and foremost, Ouija is yet another dull, impersonal creation by producer Michael Bay, who has managed to consistently make a long series of money-making blockbusters with no distinctive traits whatsoever. His first grandiose features, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, as well as more recent ones like the Transformer series, The Purge, and Ninja Turtles, are safe and sound Hollywood products that are all about the spectacle and the fireworks — and nothing else. They bring nothing new to the scenario and are targeted to a very undemanding teen audience.
However, as regards the horror features he’s produced, two exceptions stand out from the crowd: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the first remake), and its prequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning. Granted, they are also about the spectacle of chopping, dicing, mutilating and dismembering bodies, but in these cases said spectacle makes sense in the horror.
And there’s more than just that. There’s considerable tension, a certain degree of suspense, some decent performances, a good understanding of the mechanics of the slasher subgenre, and a more than impressive use of gore. In short: you get the good scares you’re entitled to in a scary movie. Which is not the case in The Unborn, and the remakes of Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which he also produced. So it’s no surprise that his new product, Ouija, written and directed by Stiles White, is a disappointment for many reasons.
But first, the storyline: when a young and cute teenage commits suicide, her friends are devastated and yet feel there’s something weird about her taking her own life. The fact she had been using the Ouija board almost non-stop is another odd element. So when her best friend gathers some friends to get in touch with her via Ouija board, nobody is really that surprised. What’s surprising (is it really?), and quite disturbing, is that they don’t actually contact the dead girl’s spirit, but another spirit of malevolent temper. Now it’s time for the dying game to begin.
Each and every single narrative device used in Ouija has been used countless times before. But had they all been executed with enough nervousness and intrigue, the result would have been more than passable. Since the execution is often lame — doors unsurprisingly open all of a sudden, faces and silhouettes come out of the blue, secrets in the attic are unveiled when they are no longer secrets, blasts of music and sounds that are only deafening and never frightening — then the end result is equally lame.
On top of that, there’s not a hint of humour, or parody, or tongue in cheek. The filmmakers really want you to take Ouija seriously from beginning to end. That’s kind of impossible. The worst part is that this time Michael Bay has produced a horror film with no horror. Ouija has almost no gore at all, it’s talky and tedious, it offers no cinematic spectacle of any kind, and it lacks emotional impact.
At times, you even feel as if you were watching not a PG-13 movie, but a censored one. So you could say this new outing brings the worst of Hollywood mainstream: impersonal formula targeted at a teen audience, without the spectacle, the flesh and the blood.
Production notes
Ouija (US, 2014). Directed by Stiles White. Written by Stiles Whites, Juliet Snowden. With Olivia Cooke, Daren Kagasoff, Ana Coto. Cinematography: David Emmerichs. Editing: Ken Blackwell. Produced by Michael Bay. Running time: 89 minutes.
