Ouija

This review originally appeared on the San Francisco Appeal.

When I was a kid, I had a Ouija board, and I was an eager "player," because it is, as the box says, merely a game, right? I was also incredibly gullible, and friends and family took advantage of that gullibility more than once, and for a hot minute, I DID believe in ghosts.

Hasbro continues to sell Ouija boards to those who want to believe, though it's marketed, still, as a game. Which is why it's a little weird that Ouija is, essentially, a game tie-in, partially produced by Hasbro. It's kind of like doing a movie version of the board game Life, where everyone in that little car dies a horrible, violent death.

Ouija is a flat out dumb, predictable, and pointless horror movie. All the scares are telegraphed a mile ahead. The plot, about the ghosts of a dead medium, and a little girl with a sewn-shut mouth, doesn't make a lick of sense if you stop to think about it for even a second. It's rated PG-13, so perhaps younger audiences will flock to it, but all I know is by the time I was 13, I was over my gullible years, and watching much better, and scarier, movies than Ouija.