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Ouija (2014), PG-13, ★

What did the board tell them to do? Uh-oh. 
This movie is about a Ouija board. That's it. Nothing more.

Laine and Debbie (Olivia Cooke and Shelley Hennig) are distant friends as Laine was having a hallucination of her sister, Sarah, after playing with a Ouija board. Debbie appears distressed and as Laine is going over to the house, they discuss the memory of playing the board and Laine dismisses her as a spaz. And as a result, Debbie commits suicide.

Laine receives a text message saying that her family needs to speak to her after Debbie's death and she manages to make the funeral. Debbie's mother asks Laine to house-sit while they are away as she agrees to the offer. Laine finds Debbie's Ouija board and decides to invite his friends: Sarah (Ana Coto), Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), Isabelle (Bianca A. Santos), and Debbie's boyfriend, Pete (Douglas Smith). They manage to contact a spirit and they think it is Debbie and as a result, they are too frightened to play with the board anymore. When the message "hi friend" is all over the friends' locations, they discover it is not Debbie but somebody else.

From the first five minutes of the film, the movie was headed into one direction: into a straight wall with no emphasis on the characters or no takeoff. Almost every horror movie cliché is distributed into the film and the jump-scares are just products of a story that is basically product placement of Hasbro Corporation. The characters are not interesting, the story is dull, the pacing is slow and the climax and payoff is silly. It was a boring and dissatisfying picture for the absent-minded and that is an insult. The only positive aspect of the movie is that it is mostly in focus and the Ouija board looks good. It's like saying that there is one good cable channel full of bad cable channels on television. Yeah, just don't watch this on cable.

*

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