Board To Death

Year: 2014

Director: Stiles White

Cast: Olivia Cooke, Ana Coto, Daren Kagasoff

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Happy Halloween, everybody! I can hardly think of a better way to celebrate with you all than by reviewing the latest dumbass teen horror flick laboriously shoved into theaters to fill the recently-vacated Paranormal Activity slot. Last year we got the remake of Carrie, which was better than it had any right to be. This year we get Ouija - a film adaptation of a board game adaptation of an ancient spiritual device because Hollywood has devoured every last morsel of the horror pie and is now licking the tin.

Truth be told, it's not as bad as it could have been. But seeing as how its Bad potential was a bottomless pit of existential despair and its Good potential was - at maximum - a noncommittal shrug, this doesn't say much about Ouija. And by scraping its way to being halfway watchable, it ruins any potential camp value with its aggressive mediocrity. Oh well. Let's not pretend that modern teen horror was going to get any better than this.

And nowadays we just communicate with the undead through Twitter, so this is sorely outdated.

Ouija's story is as old as the wise oak tree, but we'll run through it briefly anyway. Debbie (Shelly Hennig) and her friend Laine (The Quiet Ones' Olivia Cooke) used to play with the Ouija board when they were kids, but while their friendship has persevered, the tradition has not. But when Debbie is found hanging from her rafters on a string of Christmas lights like a macabre department store display, Laine suspects that a Ouija board in her room has something to do with it.

She gathers her smarmily hot friends to use the Ouija one last time in an attempt to contact her dead friend's spirit and find out what really happens. These friends include Pete (Douglas Smith of Stage Fright), Debbie's now ex-boyfriend; Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), Laine's unctuous beau who says totally rational things like "Don't worry about the noise. It's just an old house." and does totally normal human teen things like walk his bike through dark runoff tunnels after trying to contact the spirit of his dead friend; Isabelle (Bianca A. Santos), the requisite friend who doesn't want anything to do with this, you guys; and Sarah (Ana Coto), Laine's little punk rocker of a sister who she drags along in order to prevent her from hanging out with her much older (and presumably much hotter, though he unfortunately never appears onscreen) boyfriend. This character dynamic seems promising until it doesn't.

And let me tell you, spelling words one letter at a time just isn't as scary as they want it to be.

Obviously the spirit they end up contacting is something much less banal than Debbie's bland teenage ghost complaining about how bad the Wifi service is in the void. Rather, the entity they do come into contact with is the restless spirit of James Wan's The Conjuring, available now on DVD and Blu-Ray. With an evil old woman who opens her mouth wide and points at things and a supporting performance by Insidious' Lin Shaye, Ouija plumbs Wan and Whannell's playbook, mangling their favorite tropes for a healthy dose of paranormal insipidity.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Horror has always been recursive, bringing old elements into new stories to remix and refashion them. James Wan's films themselves are absolutely not free of borrowed elements. If cinematic influences were patches on a film's sleeve, The Conjuring would be that punk rock kid with the denim jacket that hated everyone in high school. But in Ouija its numerous borrowed tropes (including the morally dubious Magical Latina who teaches the teens about how not to screw around with spirits) are displayed with no aplomb, simply recycling what's easy and so shopworn it can't not be successful in some cases - at least in providing momentary, unexemplary thrills.

But the result of all this pilfering is that Ouija turns into a mixed bag of paranormal tropes and jump scares (a whole bunch of investigating strange noises and villains that you see too much of to be scary, with a little bit of found footage thrown in, cuz that's been popular lately), neither creating an effective atmosphere nor putting its own personal stamp on the genre. It's just the same old milquetoast genre fare that audiences are (hopefully) really starting to get tired of Hollywood spoon-feeding to them.

Wanna know another thing that's not scary? The word "planchette."

Everything in the film is half-hearted from the PG-13 gore on down. Once we reach the level of character, forget about it. Emotional beats are skated over at Olympic aptitude levels. Everyone is super sad Debbie died because that's in the exposition, but once Isabelle kicks it, her friends are all "Isabelle who?" And when Pete is inexplicably stricken with a case of floss-mouth - watch the trailer, it's nonsense - he's spirited away from the film with a single cryptic text message (the film makes an argument for the increased integration of modern technology in cinema but not enough to give it more than a passing nod, let alone a paragraph).

I can think of worse ways to spend 90 minutes than watching attractive characters make bad decisions for 90 minutes, but Ouija is so entirely toothless. It attempts to hide its deficiencies behind a couple decent shock scares, but there's no reason to seek out this film unless you are stricken - like Yours Truly - with Genre Completist Syndrome.

TL;DR: Ouija is nothing more nothing less than average teen popcorn horror.

Rating: 5/10

Should I Spend Money On This? No, especially not while the delightfully macabre The Book of Life is still in theaters. Or check out Daniel Radcliffe in Horns, out today!

Word Count: 977

Reviews In This Series

Ouija (White, 2014)

Ouija: Origin of Evil (Flanagan, 2016)

The Bland Finale

Year: 2014

Director: Jerome Sable

Cast: Minnie Driver, Meat Loaf, Allie MacDonald

Run Time: 1 hour 29 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Much like happy families, modern slashers are all alike. And, oddly enough, the non-postmodern ones are pretty much like the rest of the 80's crap, only without the rough-and-tumble spark of that decade. These slick and anonymous films come crawling out of the woodwork with their classically-inspired poster designs and killer pun-intended ad campaigns, promising to bring a wave of cheesy nostalgia but instead crumpling under the pressure long before the Final Girl begins her inevitable face-off with another one of a crop of indistinguishable killers.

Stage Fright is perhaps even worse than these because it brings along another promise. You see, this Canadian splatter flick is a musical. Because I apparently haven't learned my lesson after the disastrously limp acoustic rock of 2010's Don't Go in the Woods, I was pretty excited to sink my teeth into it.

Little did I know what my poor teeth were in for.

Stage Fright tells the tale of one Camilla Swanson (Allie MacDonald), the daughter of a great actress (Minnie Driver) who was murdered on the opening night of a new musical, the halfheartedly copyright-coded Haunting of the Opera. That title only gets more annoying as the film goes along. Cut to ten years later where Camilla and her twin brother Buddy (Douglas Smith) are working in the kitchen of their adoptive father, Roger(Meat Loaf)'s theatre camp, Center Stage.

Thus begins the first of Stage Fright's lukewarm musical numbers as the arriving campers sing their praises about being able to finally return to the one place where they can be their true selves with no fear of rejection. It's choreographed amusingly enough but the large segment of the song dedicated to gay people as written by somebody who has clearly never met one is an early indicator of the questionable sexual politics that pervade the film like ants in a box of raisins.

When Roger announces that this year's musical is going to be a revival of the very play that her mother died performing, Camilla finds her true calling and auditions although you'd think she would want to avoid incurring the wrath of one of the many slasher villains with sharp knives and impeccable senses of irony. Unfortunately, this happens.

Perhaps fortunately. Things were getting slow.

Basically, to make sure she gets to perform the role on opening day in front of a prominent talent scout, she must get past Artie (Brandon Uranowitz) the director, a horny douche who lets it be known in no uncertain terms that he will give the part to whichever girl - Camilla or her rival Liz (Melanie Leishman) - puts out.

This ends up having no real relevance on the plot except for setting up one of the approximately 800 red herring suspects for the slew of murders that inevitably occurs on opening night. No, wait. I lied. There is one other purpose and that is making the viewers extremely uncomfortable with its vilifying of sexuality, something I thought we had quite outgrown in slasher films after Neve Campbell got her rocks off with Skeet in 1996.

Anyway, the cast of the play starts getting bumped off one by one by a killer in a kabuki mask who wails puns in a hair metal voice and stays onscreen for as little time as possible to make room for the maximum capacity of tepid musical numbers. All the while he spouts off reprehensible puns stolen wholesale from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and not even the good ones.

It's shrill, it's nonsensical, and although the deaths are bloody there are not nearly enough of them to counterbalance the sheer surfeit of fun. In fact, for a summer camp flick, there's surprisingly little camp value to be found in Stage Fright, unless you count Douglas Smith's deranged performance in which he relies on vibrating his skull at increasingly rapid speeds in lieu of actually acting out motions and speaks like he just got home from getting his wisdom teeth removed.

It's impressive that he managed to be the worst performer in a film that is essentially a kabuki fever dream.

The final reveal of the killer is simultaneously predictable and illogical, but I shan't cover that because I want to avoid spoilers and I actively don't care. At any rate, the more important aspect is the gore, which is perhaps more brazen than some of the more sanitized PG-13 slashers we saw in the late 2000's, but save for an impressive early scene, really isn't enough to wet my bloody whistle.

The killer shrieks every line with unmodulated venom like an Iron Maiden imitator in an American Idol audition montage and the entire film follows suit, loudly proclaiming its mediocrity and shoving it down your throat with every chance it gets, wasting the goodwill procured by the first couple scenes.

The backstage drama of the first half is minimally exciting, but the shallow horror of the second drives it straight into the ground, capping it all off with a truly pointless final scene that serves as an emphasis for how irrelevant the entire movie proved to be in the long run.

Oh well. At least people keep making slasher movies. That means that eventually a good one should come around, right? A million monkeys on a million typewriters...

Body Count: 7; including the killer but not including a severed head found in a dumpster because the mold was so poorly done it was next to impossible to figure out who it belonged to.
TL;DR: Stage Fright is obnoxious and stupid, wasting the premise of a slasher musical.
Rating: 4/10
Word Count: 954