Movie Madness: Ouija (2014)

(Available on Netflix)

I prefer to talk to the dead using Hungry Hungry Hippos.

It starts out with these two little girls playing with a Ouija board. Debbie is the brave one and Laine is the skittish one.

Then it shows them as teenagers. Debbie lives in the same house as those that were in Ouija Origin of Evil, and she is playing with a Ouija board, all by herself, which you are not supposed to do – everyone knows that, for cripe’s sake. After turning down an offer by Laine to go do something (Debbie just hasn’t been acting like herself lately), Debbie goes back in her room, where her eyes get all cataract-y. Then she takes her decorative string of lights off her wall and uses them to hang herself (I wouldn’t even go into such detail about this if the string of lights DIDN’T SHOW UP BACK ON HER WALL AFTER SHE’S DEAD. So her mom is like, “Well, Debbie’s dead, but I did pay $2.99 for these, and I hate for them to go to waste….” Or what??? Also, kudos to the string light makers, because they didn’t break when she hung herself so they must have been pretty strong.)

So after hanging the string of lights back up, Debbie’s mom and dad decide to go on vacation (we all handle grief in different ways, I guess) and they ask Laine to check in on their house while they are gone. When she is there, she thinks Debbie is trying to communicate with her, so she finds the Ouija board and gets her friends to do it with her. And the usual spooky stuff starts happening, and her friends start dying, and Laine tracks down an old lady who used to live in the house when she was a kid.

So it turns out that this is the prequel to Ouija: Origin of Evil, which I didn’t realize for a while because I honestly watched the two movies months, if not years, apart. (Hey, I’ve been busy!) I also just now realized that I watched them out of order and have been assuming that Origin of Evil came out first, but apparently not. (I am a very linear person and I guess I assumed that because the Origin one takes place in the past it came first. Am I over explaining this?) Anyway, some of the stuff was similar in both of them so I spent a lot of time going “Have I seen this before?” But no. I think you could watch them in either order and I don’t think you’d be lost or anything (is that somehow a credit to the writers?).

And why did I pick this one, if I didn’t even realize it was tied to the Origin one? I guess I have a thing for Ouija boards. The description did make it sound better than it really was, though, unfortunately.

No animals harmed. In fact, I don’t even think there were animals in it at all, much to my relief. As soon as you see an animal you know things are gonna be bad, so I was glad there were none and I could relax.

Gratuitous (but brief) use of a woman who sounds slightly Hispanic and somehow seems to know all about Ouija boards. Do those two things automatically go together? Being Hispanic and a Ouija board expert? Or what? They never said she was a paranormal scholar or anything; she was a maid. In the end whatever she told them didn’t do them much good anyway. Maybe they should have asked a Lithuanian.