Movie Madness: Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016)
(Available on Netflix)
A movie made by Hasbro, the game company. Really!
It starts out with a lady giving a psychic reading to an old man and a young lady, and you’re like, “Ah, crap, she’s totally scamming this old guy.” Then it turns out the lady saves the old guy from getting scammed himself, and you’re like, “Ah, cool! Good for her.”
The lady (Alice) is a mom of two daughters – Lina, the older one, and Doris, who is about 9 or so. The dad recently died after being hit by a drunk driver, so she is giving psychic readings to make ends meet. It is a scam and her two daughters help her. True, they are making money from it, but Alice also says they are helping people by giving them comfort.
Then she decides to bring a Ouija board into the act and sh*t gets real (yo)! The youngest daughter tries to use the board to talk to the dead father and then she starts to get possessed. The mom doesn’t know this, though – she just thinks it’s awesome the dad is talking to them, and she feels like her and her daughter and the Ouija board are also “helping” other people, so she’s OK with it.
Oh, and the kids go to a Catholic school and the priest/principal guy there seems to not be concerned about the mom being a psychic and talking with the dead and all – I thought they frowned on that kind of thing, but I guess it’s all good. Maybe it’s because it’s the guy from E.T., all grown up, and maybe once you’ve hung out with an alien not much else fazes you. That would make sense.
Then the youngest daughter starts writing in Polish, the priest/principal gets it translated and they figure out that there are all kinds of ghosts in the house because after World War 2 a Nazi doctor moved into the house and kept doing experiments on people, and there’s a hidden torture room in the house where the climax happens and it doesn’t end well.
Apparently this was a sequel to Ouija, which I will try to check out in the future [Note: I did check it out and you can read about it here!]. There is a quick scene after the credits where they allude to this – I am not sure why I watched that long; I guess Marvel movies have trained me. However, this little end bit did not involve Samuel L. Jackson asking anyone to be an Avenger (although a ghost as an Avenger would be pretty cool).
You know, if I had a hidden torture room in my house, I bet the property tax people would figure it out, if it meant that the square footage of my house was increased and I had to pay them more taxes. Jerks. That’s when you need some scary ghosts in your house, is when the tax man comes around! I also always wonder, in these movies, how these people are going to explain all that’s happened to the authorities. However, I guess the ending of this movie did cover that, so good for them.
There were some creepy parts – they did make the youngest daughter look pretty creepy when she was being possessed, and there was one part where I actually did jump (shook the fleas right off of me!). But, some of the other parts where the ghosts were out and about looked really fake and CGI-ey, which was kind of disappointing. Also, I could barely see these fake-looking ghost things, and they were whispering stuff that I couldn’t really hear. Was I meant to hear it??? I don’t know. I would have liked to.
Gratuitous spooky kid.
No animals harmed, although a cute potential boyfriend was harmed, darnit.
I thought the acting was pretty good, and the story was unpredictable. Nazi doctors are always scary.
