RE: Movies that just suck.
May 31, 2015 at 10:22 pm
(This post was last modified: May 31, 2015 at 10:24 pm by Cyberman.)
Just finished watching one called The Ouija Haunting, which I picked up for three quid. I won't bother with a spoiler warning, because I very much doubt anyone will want to watch it.
It starts off pretty decent, with a group of friends playing with a ouija board ("Remember the rules - never ask how the spirit died, never ask how you're gonna die, and never stop playing without saying goodbye!"). This all happens while the titles are playing out and it gets confusing, because it's like you're getting a condensed version of the film. I actually thought I'd clicked the "making of" by mistake. Still, the visuals are nicely done.
Then we get to the film proper - and oh my fucking days, what an amateurish effort. Everything after the opening is in DV format, which comes over as a crappy youtube home movie. The story is that the opening film is supposed to be another film called The Ouija Experiment, and the cast are playing themselves onstage at a cinema for a "Ouija Ouikend" (and I'm not kidding about that spelling). They have a ghost night, the kind of thing where people pay to be chased around the cinema - which is haunted - by actors in costume going "raaaarggh!" at them. Afterwards they have a special invite-only ghost walk thing, but a couple of them have messed around with the ouija board from the film and now there's something nasty after them.
I've actually made it sound better than it really is. The thing is, it doesn't seem to know what tone to go for - zany teen comedy, self-aware horror trope parody or actual scary movie. The acting and direction make me think this was put together by a first year drama class. There are one or two genuinely creepy moments, but mostly it relies on jump scares. Honestly, I've seen far better on YouTube, with even the increasingly silly Haunting Of Sunshine Girl far more deserving of a DVD release than this.
8/10 for effort, minus several hundred for execution. If only they'd concentrated on that opening and developed that instead.
It starts off pretty decent, with a group of friends playing with a ouija board ("Remember the rules - never ask how the spirit died, never ask how you're gonna die, and never stop playing without saying goodbye!"). This all happens while the titles are playing out and it gets confusing, because it's like you're getting a condensed version of the film. I actually thought I'd clicked the "making of" by mistake. Still, the visuals are nicely done.
Then we get to the film proper - and oh my fucking days, what an amateurish effort. Everything after the opening is in DV format, which comes over as a crappy youtube home movie. The story is that the opening film is supposed to be another film called The Ouija Experiment, and the cast are playing themselves onstage at a cinema for a "Ouija Ouikend" (and I'm not kidding about that spelling). They have a ghost night, the kind of thing where people pay to be chased around the cinema - which is haunted - by actors in costume going "raaaarggh!" at them. Afterwards they have a special invite-only ghost walk thing, but a couple of them have messed around with the ouija board from the film and now there's something nasty after them.
I've actually made it sound better than it really is. The thing is, it doesn't seem to know what tone to go for - zany teen comedy, self-aware horror trope parody or actual scary movie. The acting and direction make me think this was put together by a first year drama class. There are one or two genuinely creepy moments, but mostly it relies on jump scares. Honestly, I've seen far better on YouTube, with even the increasingly silly Haunting Of Sunshine Girl far more deserving of a DVD release than this.
8/10 for effort, minus several hundred for execution. If only they'd concentrated on that opening and developed that instead.
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
