Al's Omniflick: Ouija

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Ouija

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Stiles White/Starring: Olivia Cooke, Ana Coto, Daren Kagasoff, Bianca A. Santos, Douglas Smith and Shelley Hennig

Ouija boards will never stop being a source of fascination for horror filmmakers. Though they're used mostly by bored teenagers and cranks to summon demons (at least in movies) or commune with the dead, one can buy a version for a little more than 15 bucks on Amazon or any toy retailer. I remember our family owned one when I was a kid but it usually provided only ten minutes worth of amusement after the incommunicado spiritual world refused to play along. After a Ouija board was featured in The Exorcist, one of my brothers burned our copy; fearing it's malevolent potential. Why Satan's minions or the spirit world would find a game board manufactured by Hasbro or Parker Brothers an effective means of transit into our world is quite peculiar. If a board game like Ouija works so well, might not Stratego or Yahtzee be just as effective? (Note to self: try summoning dead relatives or a netherworld entity using Candyland)

In director Stiles White's first feature film, Ouija makes another appearance.

We see two young girls playing with the game while going over unwritten rules about how and when to use the Ouija board (e.g. never play alone, etc.).
We then see one of the girls, Debbie (Shelley Hennig), now a teenager in the present day, trying to burn the game after some unpleasant experiences. As the game board smolders in the fire, her best friend Laine (Olivia Cooke; a poor man's Leighton Meester), visits and tries to convince Debbie to join her for an evening at a school event. Debbie decides to remain home; choosing instead to stay alone in what must be one of the the most poorly-lit homes in horror film history. How anyone with a modicum of sound mental health would spend an evening alone in such a house says something about the writers' idea of plausibility.

Before long, strange, spooky things begin to happen inside the house. Shortly thereafter, Debbie uses a cord of lights to hang herself from a light fixture. Laine and friends are naturally distraught but also puzzled as to why a seemingly happy teen would commit suicide. While at the funeral reception, Laine finds the Ouija board Debbie tried to destroy, which she remembers using with her best friend as children.

Feeling dissatisfied after canvassing her friends to determine Debbie's state of mind before the suicide, Laine decides to use the Ouija board to try to summon her best friend's spirit (talk about bad ideas!). Having agreed to house-sit in Debbie's home while the parents are away (bad idea #2), Laine, her sister Sarah (Ana Coto), and her friends hold a seance to make contact with their deceased chum. Some of the friends are naturally skeptical but go along with it. Of course the game planchette responds to their questions, and before long, eery, scary sounds are heard throughout the house and for once in a horror movie, the teenagers head for the door and escape.

Afraid to return to Debbie's house, Laine brings the Ouija board home with her (unbelievably bad idea #3) and unwittingly invites whatever tormented her friend into her own house.

Unable to leave well-enough alone, Laine continues to delve into the mystery of the friend's death while also feeling guilt about whether her intervention might have prevented the tragedy. And because Laine is persistent in pursuing answers, the spirits involved begin to menace her friends and kill them off, one by one, until only she and her sister Ana and Debbie's boyfriend Pete (Douglas Smith) are left to fend off the spectral naughties.

In time Laine learns that the former occupant of Debbie's home was a medium whose daughters became evil practitioners. Debbie inadvertently became one of their victims after playing with the Ouija game.

The rest of the film involves Laine, Sarah and Peter returning to Debbie's home and there they find a secret basement where the daughters observed their dark rituals. To dispel the evil, Laine must burn the skeletal remains of the daughter who succumbed to the dark side with the Ouija board, which of course the daughter/spirit tries to thwart.

If I've missed some key elements of the story, I'm sure you'll forgive me; I was menaced by my own abstract foes in the theater; namely boredom and distraction. Unlike the recent Annabelle, White's film doesn't go for the gut. Horror movie cliches are trotted out, one by one, like models on a fashion runway but without any style or tension to give them a unique or fun spin.

And like most teenagers in horror films, who are on furlough from the Asylum for the Stupid, Laine and her friends abandon common sense at every turn. And in the aftermath, after Laine loses several of her friends to the spirit's murderous designs--we see her sitting on her bed at home. Her sister asks if she is okay, to which Laine offers a very reserved "Yeah, I'm okay." I wanted to scream at the screen, "Hey, Laine, you're directly responsible for the deaths of several of your best friends and you act as if you just got over a bad cold; where the hell is your tortured guilt or regret?!" I think the spirits killed the wrong person. Laine's insistence on contacting Debbie, which she mindlessly and recklessly pursued over the strong objections of her friends, left a trail of dead bodies her actions can hardly justify. But what about Laine's friends' complicity in their own deaths? I would think most people, after having a frightening first encounter with the spirit world, might say "Screw you, Laine; go chat with a ghost on your own; I'm not idiotic enough to to mess with something that wants me very dead."

But that would be a movie where everyone behaved sensibly.

Before I left the theater, I caught the producer credits onscreen. Among the names was--I should have guessed--Michael Bay. It's bad enough the 2014 Summer movie season was littered with mindless shlock he either produced or directed (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers: Age of Extinction; to name two) but now we have to suffer his other seasonal, inane swill as well.

Annabelle used the horror movie panoply of scares to great effect. We recognized all the tricks but the film delivered. Ouija couldn't even be troubled to give us one scare or chill. Instead, we meet a bunch of teen lunkheads who look high school but think kindergarten and some clowns from the spirit world who couldn't frighten a room full of jumpy 4-year-olds.

No folks; don't burn that Ouija board just yet; you may want to use it to have your movie money refunded, or better yet, to contact the dark lord of the underworld to come claim one of his minions: a knuckle-headed wraith named Michael Bay.

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On DVD

Fury (1936)

Director: Fritz Lang

Though we might normally think of the films M and Metropolis when director Fritz Lang becomes the topic of conversation, less known is the legendary director's work in Hollywood. Having fled the ever-growing menace of Nazi Germany for America in the early 1930s', Lang eventually found himself under contract for MGM.

Though his work in Hollywood is very uneven, one standout is Fury, from 1936. Starring Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney, the film's condemnation of mob justice seems spectacularly daring now, considering lynching was still a reality in Depression-era America. We don't see one black person in the film entire but we know precisely for whom Lang film is sympathetic.

Spencer Tracy plays Joe Wilson, who is arrested in a small town while en route to meet his fiance, Katherine (Sylvia Sydney). Suspected of being part of a kidnapping of a little girl, Wilson is arrested on the flimsiest evidence. While he sits in cell; angry and indignant, Katherine is puzzled as to why her fiance hasn't arrived at their prearranged meeting place.

But Wilson's fortunes take a darker and more dangerous turn when a mob--already on edge--is roused to anger. Egging one another on, the mob moves on the jailhouse where Wilson is being held. As the angry gathering becomes a mass, drawing citizens of the town into their swelling numbers, a lynch-mob begins to form. The sheriff, determined to see due process take its course, refuses their forceful demands. Becoming angrier and angrier and bolder and bolder, the crowd storms the jail, overwhelming the sheriff and his deputies. Unable to unlock the cell doors to reach Wilson, the mob sets the jailhouse ablaze as an alternate method of lynching.

Katherine, having arrived on the scene, faints when she sees flames engulf the cell where her fiance is held.

In spite of the mob acting as a faceless entity, its principle members are brought to trial though the town and the defendants maintain a conspiracy of silence, hoping to escape convictions and censure.

A sure acquittal seems imminent until damning evidence assures their guilt. When the majority of the members receive death sentences, Wilson turns up at his brothers, having survived the fire. Knowing the public is unaware of his survival, he vows to stay in hiding to ensure the mob conspirators are executed.

The scene where Katherine, nearly insane from grief, comes face to face with Joe is a powerful moment in the film. As she slowly recovers from her state, she realizes Joe's vindictive determination to see the mob hang is in itself a great injustice.

The story climaxes during a stirring courtroom scene that brings the fascinating story to a close.

I would have never expected Hollywood to make a statement as powerful as Fury made in 1936. Given the fact that lynchings in America at the time went unpunished, the movie railed bravely, in spite of the main character being white rather than black, against what was then the status quo. The Oxbow Incident would make a similar and commensurately powerful statement seven years later.

The film's willingness to peer into the darker side of American life could be partly attributed to Lang, who co-wrote the story and who was no stranger to exploring the darker side of humanity. Having seen evil flower in his home country, it makes sense Lang would choose to tell this story.

Spencer Tracy and Sylvia Sydney give wonderful, emotionally layered performances. Katherine's near descent into madness is depicted touchingly by Sydney. To see Tracy's mild-mannered Wilson become angry and vengeful is heartbreaking.

Even watching Lang's film on a small screen does little to diminish its power. Weeks after the viewing, I still can't shake its indelible images or its angry indictment of one of America's great crimes. One couldn't devise a better title than one it was given eighty years ago. Fury indeed.