OUIJA HOUSE (2018)

Studio:       ITN Distribution
Director:    Ben Demaree
Writer:       Justin Hawkins, Jeff Miller
Producer:  Jeff Miller
Stars:     Mischa Barton, Tara Reid, Carly Schroeder, Mark Grossman, Grace Demarco, Derrick A. King, Tiffany Shepis, Justin Hawkins, Nathaniel Meek, Dee Wallace, Chris Mulkey

Review Score:

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Summary:

Cousins connected to a coven of witches awaken an evil warlock when they use a Ouija board inside a cursed family home.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

1988 – Katherine Fields and her boyfriend Tomas sneak into a remote house in Katherine’s family said to be the site of evil violence. Katherine’s sister Claire joins them to use a Ouija board. Following their brief séance, a paranormal presence pulls Claire away and she disappears. Tomas flees. An unseen man attacks Katherine and throws her outside through a window.

Present Day – Katherine’s daughter Laurie comes to help Katherine pack following a bank foreclosure on her house. Laurie vows to buy the house back using profits from a publishing deal for her upcoming book about paranormal phenomena. Laurie also mentions visiting the remote house for research relating to their family’s history with witchcraft. Katherine warns Laurie to stay away from the property as well as anyone from her cousin Samantha’s side of the family.

Laurie’s boyfriend Nick arrives. Laurie informs Nick that their friend Spence and his girlfriend Tina will be joining them for their experiments at the house, even though there is tension among the group since Nick and Tina made out while drunk.

Laurie’s cousin Samantha, whose mother was Claire, greets Laurie and her friends when they arrive at the house. Samantha points out a pile of sacred stones that were used by her and Laurie’s ancestors, who were good witches that communed with nature.

Tina becomes strangely entranced by a creepy doll found in her room. Nick tells Spence he is suspicious of Laurie’s publisher. Laurie finds a Ouija board hidden in a secret room in the shed.

Samantha recounts how a warlock named Roka joined her family’s coven. After becoming obsessed with black magic, Roka formed his own coven of evil witches dedicated to freeing their pagan god through blood rituals. Roka’s coven would kidnap nearby villagers and force them to play an anagram word game. When the villagers failed, Roka sacrificed their babies under the belief that newborn blood could open dimensional doorways.

Laurie goes to retrieve the Ouija board but finds it missing. Inexplicably, the board reappears on the dining room table.

Tomas unexpectedly shows up at the house. Samantha hides. Tomas recognizes Laurie as Katherine’s daughter. After issuing a cryptic warning, Tomas abruptly leaves in a state of fright.

Samantha, Laurie, Nick, Tina, and Spence use the Ouija board. A spirit compels them to play an anagram word game.

Tomas calls Katherine to tell her that he was unable to steer Laurie away with his book publisher ruse and she is now inside the house with Samantha. Panicked, Katherine pleads for Tomas to get Laurie out. Tomas refuses to go back to the house.

A vision of Roka causes Tomas to crash his vehicle. Katherine calls Tomas back and hears Roka’s voice, which causes Katherine to collapse on her floor in convulsions.

Samantha follows sounds of a baby crying to the strange doll upstairs. An unseen presence traps Samantha in the bedroom. The doll mysteriously reappears downstairs.

After Laurie explains that anything can be used as a Ouija board, Tina writes letters on her stomach and chest to make her body a board. Laurie, Nick, and Spence use one of the witch stones as a planchette. The spirit guides the stone into Tina’s mouth, causing Tina to swallow it and choke.

Laurie, Nick, and Spence rush Tina to their van to take her to a hospital. Strangely, they end up driving in circles that repeatedly take them back to the house.

Laurie realizes their séance opened a portal and they must destroy the Ouija board to close it. The quartet returns to the house and burns the Ouija board in the fireplace.

Tomas stumbles back to the house shirtless and holding a handgun. Tomas warns that the spirit will trap them in the house to play its game until everyone dies. Tomas tells Laurie that her mother tried to stop it in 1988, but ended up bringing the evil back. Tomas suddenly shoots himself.

The stone in Tina’s stomach starts moving. Tina becomes entranced by the doll once again while claiming she can hear children crying. Laurie throws the doll into the fire when she sees its head move.

Nick later finds Tina in a state of possession banging her head against a wall. Laurie peels back the paint where Tina bled and finds a letter written underneath. Acting as a human planchette, Tina leads Laurie, Nick, and Spence to more letters hidden beneath paint. Laurie realizes that the entire house is an enormous Ouija board.

The spirit finally identifies itself as Roka. Laurie finds Samantha’s dead body. Everyone tries to leave again only to find that they are supernaturally trapped inside the house.

Laurie consults a grimoire for details about Roka’s history as well as his game. Laurie learns that the house was built with wood from the trees where Roka’s occult rituals emitted evil energy. The story also reveals that the good witches infiltrated Roka’s coven to set a trap for him. By forcing Roka to swallow the sacred stone he corrupted, they stripped him of his power. After cutting him up, the witches buried Roka’s body parts under the house’s basement. They then painted letters on the walls so he would not have a grasp of language at his fingertips, thus keeping his spirit trapped in the house. Laurie concludes Roka is trying to cross back to the real world.

Nick challenges Laurie to face the truth about her life by admitting he wanted to make out with Tina. He also presents Laurie with a phony business card found on Tomas’ body proving Tomas and Katherine plotted to bury her book all along.

Laurie tells Roka they will finish his anagram game by continuing to use Tina as a planchette. After making an incorrect guess, an unseen presence pulls Nick into a room where a vision of Roka kills him.

Spence guesses incorrectly in the next round. Based on an instruction in the grimoire, Laurie and Spence use paper and tape to cover up all of the wall letters spelling Roka’s name.

The unseen presence knocks Spence unconscious. Nick’s reanimated corpse confronts Laurie. Laurie apologetically stabs into Tina’s stomach to repossess the sacred stone.

In a state of possession, Tina begins choking Laurie. Spence recovers and uses Tomas’ gun to shoot Tina. However, Tina reanimates just like Nick did.

Laurie finishes covering the letters in Roka’s name. Tina collapses dead in Spence’s arms, seemingly breaking the curse.

3 Months Later – Laurie and Spence discuss how events were explained by police pinning all of the murders on Tomas. Using a loan from Spence, Laurie moves Katherine, still recovering from her seizure, back into her house. Laurie finds the witch stones on the kitchen counter and hears banging on the bathroom wall. Laurie finds Katherine in a state of possession like Tina and sees that her mother’s house is also a giant Ouija board.

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Review:

Mischa Barton and Tara Reid I understand.  They’ve been diminishing the value of their faded celebrity status for so long, their résumés no longer notice the addition of yet another direct-to-video disappointment.

But what in the world are Dee Wallace and Chris Mulkey doing in something like “Ouija House?”  Has their management become so careless that they too are pockmarking respectable careers by swimming in the gutters of home video horror?

Let’s burn through this and move on as quickly as possible.  That’s the same sentiment you’ll have if you end up involved with this film in any way, shape, or form.

Tara Reid only fills out the first five minutes of “Ouija House” by playing Dee Wallace’s character Katherine in a flashback.  With blonde hair being the only physical feature they share in common, I snickered at the very idea of Tara Reid passing for a younger Dee Wallace.  It turns out Wallace was 40 in 1988 when the prologue takes place, making it not entirely off-base for 42-year-old Reid to portray her earlier incarnation.

Katherine, her sister Claire (Tiffany Shepis in an even briefer appearance), and her boyfriend Tomas sneak into a remote family home we find out later has a curious connection to a coven of witches.  This makes it one of the worst places possible to play with a Ouija board, which of course is precisely why the trio wants to do it.  You don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that bad things happen next.

Fast forward to the present where Katherine’s daughter Laurie comes to help mom pack her things after two inexperienced actors playing bankers foreclose on Katherine’s house using stiffly delivered dialogue.  Laurie’s plan to buy mom’s house back involves profits from publishing her upcoming thesis about “paranormal phenomenons” (sic).  I can’t imagine what kind of niche science book involving supernatural studies could possibly make 1/1,000th of the money necessary to pay off what is probably a $350,000 mortgage on an L.A. area home, but that’s the least of the movie’s plentiful plot point oversights.

Even though Laurie’s research requires her to visit the other family home, which she weirdly refers to as a “cabin” despite it being a hilltop mansion, Katherine remains suspiciously adamant that Laurie must never go up there.  If only Laurie heeded mom’s warning, the movie could mercifully end at the ten-minute mark and save everyone, particularly the audience, a whole lot of headaches.

Alas, Laurie heads to the isolated location with her boyfriend Nick, their friend Spence, and Spence’s girlfriend Tina.  Laurie and company get greeted by Laurie’s cousin Samantha (Mischa Barton).  Samantha’s sole purpose is to serve up exposition on a silver platter, which she immediately starts doing by recounting the house’s horrible history with a warlock who sought to open a dimensional doorway using the blood of sacrificed babies.

Although rough around the edges, conceptually this is not at all a bad foundation to lay for a horror film.  Granted, we’re generally not treading into new territory when Ouija boards, witches, ignored warnings, and haunted houses in remote woods are involved. But these are good enough ingredients for getting straightforward fright film fare off the ground.

“Ouija House’s” problem involves putting its production together haphazardly.  As indicated earlier, core issues with the script put larger concerns in play.  But little things really add up to take a toll too.

Some of the cheaply cut corners include a painfully obvious bleached blonde wig on a rolling stunt person standing in for Tara Reid during the opening.  Not only is the shot overlit to draw attention to the discrepancy, the film even repeats the sequence a second time during a flashback later on.

An awkwardly staged car crash fares just as poorly.  Low-budget indies face this challenge regularly, though some still find creative ways to cut, shoot, and fake a semi-believable stunt when they can’t afford to damage a vehicle.  Here, the sequence only uses a long shot where trees obscure the car, the sound of screeching tires, and a quick cut to an actor suddenly lurching forward.  It’s almost as bad as the laughable “grar!” growled by a possessed person that sounds like a kindergartner doing an Incredible Hulk impression.

The script pointlessly adds side stories with no narrative payoff whatsoever.  Characters repeatedly beat around a bush regarding something that happened between Nick and Tina.  Eventually, we’re told they made out while drunk once.  Despite assertions of the incident being water under the bridge, Laurie still treats Tina coolly and sends suspicious looks in Nick’s direction when she catches him eyeing Tina’s tight shorts.  Will Nick and Tina’s casual flirting turn into a full-blown affair?  Will Laurie find out?  Or has she possibly been setting up the duo for something sinister all along?  How about none of the above, as next to nothing ultimately comes of this died-on-the-vine tension between the four friends.

A moment arrives when Laurie muses about how anything can be a Ouija board.  So she and Nick put the real one aside in favor of using a dry erase marker to draw letters on a wipe board.  What?  That’s possibly the dumbest way to connect the dot for moving to Tina deciding to draw a board on her own body.

I’ll give “Ouija House” credit for turning a human being into a board.  I’ve never seen that before and honestly, revealing that the haunted house is actually a colossal Ouija board has novelty value too.  Those points are immediately lost though, when the players use a stone as a planchette that the spirit slowly moves into Tina’s mouth and inexplicably, no one makes any motion to stop Tina from choking on it.

The sight of Chris Mulkey having to do a scene shirtless to simulate being disheveled makes me embarrassed for him.  Plain chyron credits wouldn’t pass muster on cable access TV.  The only way a certain someone’s death could be more cartoonish is if she had X’s drawn on her eyelids.

“Ouija House” isn’t a lazy movie as there is legitimate effort to be seen here and there on the screen.  But it is a rushed production, and negligence rears its ugly head far more often in these woefully dopey details.

Standards for this level of B-movie don’t demand much to earn a passable grade on a bell curve.  Even “Ouija House” should be capable of meeting the minimum criteria.  With only a modest amount of additional elbow grease, flaws might have been forgivable.  Instead, the film is simply forgettable.

Review Score:  30

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