Board To Tears

For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 2016

Director: Mike Flanagan

Cast: Elizabeth Reaser, Lulu Wilson, Annalise Basso

Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Sequels are tricky things, especially horror sequels. Recapturing the magic that tingled spines across the nation is a Sisyphean task, and explains the well-meaning but egregious failures of flicks like Exorcist II: The Heretic or Poltergeist II: The Other Side. Ouija: Origin of Evil didn’t have to worry about that, because the original Ouija wasn’t very good at all. But that puts it in a strange position. Should it carry over the elements of the original and be a true sequel, or just scrap everything but the name and start again? The title indicates that they went with the latter, with its scrupulous avoidance of the number 2.

Throw in director Mike Flanagan, who has made a habit of producing solid but not-quite-there 7/10 films, and you have a recipe for a move that could either be an unequivocal nightmare or the Empire Strikes Back of the horror genre. As it turns out, it’s neither. It runs straight down the middle, but what else would you hire Mike Flanagan for?

You’ve done it again, you rascal.

In Ouija: Origin of Evil (which hews oddly closely to the mystery uncovered in the original film, though you don’t need to have seen it to understand the plot), it’s the 1960’s and the Zander family runs a fortune telling business out of their house, as mother Alice (Elizabeth Reaser) fakes contact with the spirit world with the help of her daughters; rebellious teen Lina (Annalise Basso) and 9-year-old Doris (Lulu Wilson).

When Alice decides to add a Ouija board prop to her show, Doris attempts to use it to contact her dead father, accidentally opening a channel to the spirit world. As an evil presence slowly begins to possess her, Alice at first thinks she’s made contact with her late husband, but Lina has her doubts. She enlists her Catholic school principal Father Tom (Henry Thomas) to help her uncover the mystery.

And he seems weirdly OK with the occult, because Blumhouse movies STILL can’t tell the difference between ghosts and demons.

Well, Mike Flanagan has done it again. And by that I mean he has made 2/3 of a good movie. For the vast majority of its run time, Origin of Evil is an admittedly cliché but engaging paranormal horror film until which point it decides to pound a 4Loco and run in circles screaming for 20 minutes, just like Flanagan’s 2013 effort Oculus. The man doesn’t know where to stop, and while that’s not always a drawback in the horror genre, it can also lead to some excruciatingly silly moments.

Origin of Evil reaches that point and hurtles right past it with an indefinitely extended denouement that disgorges layer upon layer of nonsense like an out-of-control frozen yogurt machine. I suppose, as a prequel, there was a limit to how much new material they could add to the plot, leading to this inarticulate fright gag navel gazing. But there’s no denying that the film actively undoes a lot of the good it develops in the first hour.

Luckily, there’s a lot of good in there, even if it’s not particularly innovative. The slow boil of the thrills provides for a good long stretch of subtle gags that use character and tangible practical effects that really nail their mood before they apply the CGI lacquer required by all modern haunting movies. And the reason they can use characters for scares is because they actually have them!

Who knew humans were important in horror movies?

Origin of Evil makes the most of its leads, allowing each and every one of them to develop naturally and explore their own regrets about the past and reaction to the paranormal findings of the present. Even Henry Thomas’ priest is given an unreal amount of attention, giving us a compelling insight into his complex personal motivations before shoving him into an obligatory Exorcist shot and tossing all emotional resonance to the wolves of its bonkers finale. It helps that Flanagan has assembled a solid cast that works hard to earn Ouija’s more dramatic beats, especially Oculus alum Annalise Basso, who has certainly become a young actress to watch out for.

The most fresh, fun element for which I would recommend Ouija: Origin of Evil is its sense of humor, which provides solid, necessary comic relief without undermining either the scares or the reality of the story. Probably the best purveyor of this particular angle is Lina’s friend Betty, played by Alexis G. Zall (boy does this film make great use of its young actors, across the board) who only appears in one scene but steals the film so well she should join the next Ocean’s 11 movie.

While none of these good elements can’t be found elsewhere, there’s no denying that they work. Ouija: Origin of Evil throttles the bland teen horror of Ouija and twists it into an emotional family nightmare cum funhouse thrill ride. That’s a resounding success in my book, even if there’s perhaps no real reason to seek it out for anything other than an in-theaters Halloween sugar rush.

TL;DR: Ouija: Origin of Evil is a decently rewarding, if cliché paranormal picture.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 882
Reviews In This Series
Ouija (White, 2014)
Ouija: Origin of Evil (Flanagan, 2016)

Arrow in the Head: Mos Deaf

Year: 2016

Director: Mike Falnagan

Cast: John Gallagher Jr., Kate Siegel, Michael Trucco

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Read my full review of Hush at Arrow in the Head.

Additional Notes: OK, phew. We’re safe from prying eyes. Here are some closing thoughts on Hush, which is by far the best film I’ve ever been asked to watch for Arrow in the Head. It almost feels like I’ve been promoted. I stand by my review (I mean, obviously – I wrote it), but I’d like to expand on a couple things I didn’t have space for.

First, the killings are few and far between, but they tend to have a brutality that certainly lingers in the mind. There’s not a ton in the way of gore, and much of it is comfortably kept in shadow, but the actual act of killing (no, not the dreary documentary) is generally well-captured, tense stuff that feels like it could belong in any number of quality original movies.

Second, the film actually has a subdued but prominent sense of humor in its dialogue scenes that works wonders at sneaking its characters into your heart. And when it’s Kate Siegel’s moment to transform into a femme fatale badass, she’s pretty freaking awesome.

Hush is probably the best possible version of itself that it can be, though I kind of wish for its sake that it were something different, because then it might be a real work of art. Mike Flanagan is two for two on movies with great concepts that I really want to like but can’t muster up an overwhelming enthusiasm for.

TL;DR: Hush is a generic but totally decent survival thriller.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 920

K Is For Kaleidoscope

Year: 2014

Director: Mike Flanagan

Cast: Karen Gillan, Brenton Thwaites, Katee Sackhoff

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Oculus had two good things going for it, starting off. First, it is exceedingly rare that I go into a movie knowing next to nothing about it, so I was the perfect audience member for this sort of horror film. Second, the theater I was sitting in was right in the middle of the Long Beach Grand Prix, so the disembodied humming of the race cars outside provided a terrifically eerie environment for scary movie watching.

Oculus opens on a shot of an eye peeping through a crack in a door, which highlights its major theme (present in the title, tagline, and intermittently in the movie itself) of sight. Well, more like the idea that what you see isn't necessarily what you should believe.

Tim Russell (Brenton Thwaites) has just been released from a mental institution, where for ten years he has been dealing with what happened to him and his sister when they were children. The true nature of this event will be parsed out over the course of the film through a series of flashbacks with young Tim (Garrett Ryan) and his sister Kaylie (Annalise Basso), but what we know at the very start is that their father (Rory Cochrane) killed their insane mother (Katee Sackhoff) and would have killed them too if the ten-year-old Tim hadn't shot him in self defense.

It turns out that childhood trauma makes you pretty hot.

When he is finally released, Kaylie (Karen Gillan) seeks to prove that their father was driven mad by a haunted antique mirror that caused him and his wife to hallucinate and break down. The bulk of the film takes place in their childhood home as Kaylie runs a series of experiments to prove the mirror's guilt and Tim struggles to convince her she is just burying childhood trauma, all peppered with flashbacks to their youth.

Kaylee's sanity is called into question as the mirror resolutely continues to be a mirror and not a whirly ghost demon portal and it quickly becomes clear that not everything is as it seems. But whose perception of reality is the truth? Has mental illness taken hold in their family once again? Or is the mirror truly a source of deep evil?

This exploration of human perception is quite excellent as the film unravels into a series of jarring alternate perspectives that put every single detail of the story under a microscope. For quite some time, the film manages to be utterly terrifying, keeping gore at a minimum in favor of a series of psychological frights that are increasingly tense, keeping your knuckles white against the seatback in front of you.

I said knuckles, not eyes.

And the gore scenes that do make their way into the film pack that much more punch for their careful precision. In fact, one scene late in the film that I will not spoil is one of my favorite gore scenes I've seen this year, powerfully psychological at the same time as being viscerally bloody and revolting.

Unfortunately, this tight psychological horror flick that was on its way to receiving a solid 8 or 9 rating began to lose its bearings in the third act (A common affliction in horror. It's an epidemic.) and ended up spinning its wheels needlessly for about 25 minutes, neither furthering the plot or the horror, content to just spin the characters around like a carousel.

The ending is too plain to be affecting, the ever present powerful themes don't get a complete workout, and all in all the finale is just too weak to be attached to a film of its caliber. It was quite upsetting. But I enjoyed it nevertheless. In spite of its flaws, Oculus is a sharp exploration of themes of insanity and perception for a large portion of its run time and intelligent horror like that just doesn't come around every day anymore.

TL;DR: Oculus is a clever psychological horror film that deflates by the end of the third act but is nevertheless a terrific modern fright flick.
Rating: 7/10
Should I Spend Money On This? If you're in the mood for horror, this is one of the better ones. And hey. You might like the last third better than I did. Inexplicably, different people have different tastes.
Word Count: 736