User Reviews (248)

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  • hitchcockthelegend24 August 2015
    Horror is one of those genres that creates such voting and reviewing hostility on internet sites. You can guarantee that no matter what new horror film comes out it will garner posts on the likes of IMDb as being "the worst horror film I have ever seen". That is until the next big release, where we will go around the houses again...

    Ouija is just a standard boo-jump horror picture with a standard story line. Any expectation of any thing more would have (will do) led (lead) to great disappointment. It's one of those horror films that asks you to turn off the lights and just enjoy the quick spooky ride, then you get off the ride and quickly move on to something else. It's neither "the worst horror film of all time" or anything remotely original. It's Boo-Jump horror 101, so buy into that or leave it well alone. 6/10
  • This movie was by no means a cinematic masterpiece, however can you really expect something of such high quality when the entire premise is based around a Ouija board that wreaks havoc upon a group of close friends.

    Watching this film, my desire to watch a somewhat corny and predictable horror/thriller was achieved with ease. As someone who has been warned time and time again about the dangers of using supernatural means to attempt to contact the dead, I found this movie to be highly entertaining in a cheap-thrills kind of way.

    If you are looking for a simple, cliché supernatural themed movie to watch with close friends for a movie night, I'd definitely recommend. This movie is neither terribly unbearable nor disgustingly gory, and as such I feel is relatively inoffensive to those who enjoy these themes in their movies.
  • coreyjmesler27 December 2018
    Holds your interest throughout though it's not on a par with, say, Hell House. The cast is attractive and capable and the effects pretty good. The main reason to watch is Ana Coto, a young actress as full of charm as a peach is full of sweetness. If I had my way she'd be a star.
  • This movie never had a chance of being good - it's a modern horror movie based on a board game. Still, it could have been campy fun. After all, it is a board game. But no, Ouija is not fun. It's very, very boring.

    Everything about this movie fails on so many levels. The writing doesn't have a single original or interesting idea, and it doesn't even make sense in the end. The acting is dull, though that's largely due to the fact that our characters spend the majority of the film moping around their houses and at school. There's no way of gaining momentum of suspense when nothing is happening. The characters play the board game a couple times and there are a handful of cheap jump scares and bad effects. That's it. The direction is flat and indifferent. Worst of all, it's not scary in the least.

    Ouija is the absolute bare minimum for a horror movie, completely devoid of energy, inspiration, and any interest in telling an original story.
  • A door closing. An eye changing colour. Another door closing. If any of these things frighten you, you'll still find Ouija boring.

    The acting is wooden (even from the usually good Olivia Cooke), every plot development is telegraphed and predictable, and the whole thing reads like a first draft full of placeholder dialogue.

    After watching it, I was completely unsurprised to find that half the film had been re-shot and the last 20 minutes completely added from scratch.

    It's a film with no scares, no good dialogue, no interesting ideas, nothing at all. It's completely and totally vacuous.
  • So, I first saw "Ouija: Origin of Evil" (2016) in the theater when it came out, and I thought it was fantastic--I gave it 9/10 stars. And so, of course, I decided to go and watch the first film in the series, simply titled, "Ouija". I did so despite my having been warned by a couple of friends that it was a pretty bad movie. But, come on, how bad could it really be??? "Origin of Evil" is AWESOME....so the first one must be pretty good, right?

    Wrong. This movie is terrible. TERRIBLE.

    About the only thing I can say for the movie is that it does more or less follow the storyline of the prequel (although there are some glitches there, too), and as such it was marginally fun to find out how the story ends, so to speak.

    But, man, this movie just downright sucks all the way around. The plot is bad, the acting...is...OK, but nothing to write home about. The story is not developed at all, and it's like they just threw together a few general concepts and tossed it into a movie.

    All that said, it really is like they made the terrible sequel first, after the hit horror movie. The 2016 prequel is leaps and bounds better than this movie. But this movie itself is weak as can be. 2/10 stars....a rating I have hardly ever given before. This one's bad folks. Real bad.
  • After the death of her best friend Debbie (Shelley Hennig) that committed suicide, Laine (Olivia Cooke) brings her sister Sarah (Ana Coto) and convinces her friends Trevor (Daren Kagasoff), Isabelle (Bianca Santos) and Pete (Douglas Smith) to perform a séance using a Ouija board. However they unleash evil spirits that threat them.

    "Ouija" is unoriginal movie even in the title since there are many "Ouija" movies. I do not recall how many movies that I have seen with the same storyline, where a group of teens or even adults that use a Ouija board or a séance to accidentally awake evil spirits. The story is boring, the acting of Olivia Cooke is weak for a lead actress and the screenplay does not help. The plot point of this forgettable movie does not have anything special. My vote is four.

    Title (Brazil): "Ouija: O Jogo dos Espíritos" ("Ouija: The Game of the Spirits")
  • Warning: Spoilers
    Ouija (2014): Dir: Stiles White / Cast: Olivia Cooke, Darren Kagasoff, Douglas Smith, Shelley Hennig, Lin Shaye: Exploring the mysteries and rumors behind the Ouija board might have made a compelling thriller had the screenplay and characters not been as stupid as represented here. Olivia Cooke and Shelley Hennig play a couple of college ding bats who played with this so-called toy when they were young. Now news is out that Hennig hung herself along with her Christmas lights. This doesn't make for a jolly good festive holiday. Cooke gets together with her younger sister, her boyfriend, Hennig's boyfriend, and a waitress friend and they explore this board in the decease's house. It's all too convenient when every parent and adult seems to have something better to do out of town for plot convenience. Or perhaps they knew how stupid this film is and skipped town. At any rate director Stiles White fails to impress viewers with phoney jump scares, many of which have been done in other equally idiotic films. He loves to linger that camera on that board piece that resembles an oversized guitar pic with a glass piece. Much of the so-called scares are hokey and more laugh worthy than a Three Stooges short film. Lin Shaye even makes an appearance as a bat crazy elderly to remind us that she was in the superior, but not great Insidious. The lighting and production is fair at best but the best thing to do with a film this bad is to join the characters when they toss the Ouija board in the fireplace. Sure, the board survives, but with a little hope, this pathetic showcase will burn. Score: 2 / 10
  • Along with found footage horror, teen horrors tend to be my least favourite of the genre, but here's an exception.

    Good story, the teens aren't annoying, and it's well acted.

    Certainly worth a watch if supernatural horror is your thing, some good scares and it's suspenseful.

    Don't understand how people can rate this 4 and below
  • Ouija is not even a film worth considering. These are the type of horror films they release every year to capitalize on the small box office competition and to lure unsuspecting audience members into thinking they are watching a quality horror film. Far from quality. This is the type of crap they made in the nineties by the barrel full. Do not watch.
  • Okay...so. Normally when you see a PG-13 horror movie come out, it's either going to totally suck, or rock. This movie was actually, in the middle. It did not suck and it did not rock. *It was basically a mixture of Insidious and Final Destination.* The scares in the movie were typically those corny jump-scares, but I have to say, they weren't bad. (Or really that good, either.) The thing about PG-13 horror movies is that they aren't really that scary at all. This movie was alright, I wouldn't say scary, but it would be enough to scare a little kid because of the loud noises and scary images. The story is okay. It kind of gets better and worse and better and worse. In the beginning, the story is declining, getting worse and worse, because of all the cliché and disappointing climaxes. Then, it sort of gets better... and then back down to really bad. Then, in the second half of the movie, it starts to get really, really, intense and actually good. When you think it's over, it isn't. But when it is over, you wouldn't think that was the end. The acting was.. okay? In the beginning the acting totally STANK! I mean, it was really fake. But it got better and better as the movie progressed. The main character, Laine (Olivia Cooke) did an okay job of acting. She was the type in the movie that was sort of dumb, but in the end turned out to be a bit clever. All the things in the movie that happen are mostly things that you'd expect to happen. The special effects really were disappointing, when the monster/entity (not revealing any more than that) is shown, WOW are the effects SO FAKE.

    Lastly, don't let reviews change your mind about a movie. They are simply opinions. Just because this movie has under average ratings doesn't mean that you will automatically think this movie will and always will stink. Don't always look at the negative sides of a movie. :) And also, be careful. On my trip for watching this movie, there was a young delinquent cracking jokes to his "encouraging" friends, disrupting the full experience, so I may have missed some good parts of the movie.
  • The movie uses a very well known plot of idiot teens contacting spirit way out of their control. The teens die in pretty horrible ways very fast. However it doesn't feel like the story moves fast because things continuously got worse, but it didn't drag out so long that I lost interest. This movie played on fears I have a lot (I.e sewing of the mouth) so I was freaked out when I almost never get scared of horror movies. If you walk in expecting this movie to revive the near dead horror genre, you may be disappointed, however with its creepy effects and nice plot twists, it does give the horror genre a pulse once more showing its a hard genre to kill. I enjoyed this movie because I didn't expect the world of it, and I didn't realize it was pg- 13 for the longest. It doesn't have to b rated R to be scary.
  • "Ouija" has a pretty cool and creepy story to work with, an old spirit board discovered in the attack, suicides and haunting, a creepy legend that connects the board to the house of the suicide girl, it is all perfect horror subject matter. Unfortunately there is something missing from "Ouija" that makes it more spectacle than horror. The scenes build nicely through suspense, shadowy, eerie atmosphere, and great sound effects, but the end result falls flat. The big scares aren't really scary.

    The cast give well enough performances of these haunted characters. The direction and cinematography are equally stellar. You can tell money was well spend in production, "Ouija" has all the right components to be a real good horror film, unfortunately it all stays pretty PG. The horror seems almost pulled back into safer zones when they should have took that thrilling momentum and gone for some major scares. Not sure why they chose to keep things subdued. I mean really for what "Ouija" is it is a nice, creepy Halloween horror film based on an occult staple-the spirit board. And there are a few scare-ish moments that use the sudden shock gimmick to get a jump out of the movie-goer but still this film is far less exciting than say "Insidious" or "The Conjuring".
  • In recent times, never has a horror film centered entirely around the Ouija board game, and perhaps for good reason - it is a bit too foolish to be believable.

    Ouija boards have been utilized in horror films countless times before, as a last ditch effort to communicate with a disturbed spirit on the other side when a medium led seance is out of the question. 2014's horror film Ouija instead puts the cause and focus of the strange disturbances directly upon the game itself.

    After one of their friends inexplicably is found dead in a suspected suicide, a group of friends turn toward her Ouija board in a desperate attempt to find answers and closure. When it appears a communication channel has been opened with the dead things take a dark and unsettling turn.

    Stiles White co-writes and directs this painfully formulaic film. What audiences should expect to get from Ouija is your classic 'strange occurrences, oh no people dying, let's investigate to uncover the truth to hopefully appease the spirits'. While formulas typically exist because on some level they do work, this one has been bludgeoned to boredom inducing death.

    Typically if a film is going to be this standard then some sort of redeemable part of it must shine through, either through stellar characters portrayed by undiscovered gems or uniquely gruesome horror scenes. Ouija is a film that opens incredibly weakly, like a rough cut that should have been a reshoot. Once the group of friends, led by up-and-coming horror queen Olivia Cooke, make contact through the Ouija board the terrifying scenes considerably improve but never prove wow-worthy and still border on cliché.

    The most substantial error in the entirety of the film is the overall serious tone. The teenage high school students are all a bit too earnest when it comes to using a Ouija board. Stiles and his co-screenplay writer Juliet Snowden just really have no idea how to write realistically for teen youths. There is no humor or sarcasm, no sass and no disbelief when one of the friends approaches the other to use the Ouija board.

    Teens, even in the event that one kills him or herself, use humor as a coping mechanism. if one of my friends said 'we need to talk to ____ on the other side' I would laugh in his or her face from the ludicrous nature of the proposition.

    Further everything that propels the story forward in Ouija is a bit far-fetched. Most of the teens are incredibly serious about dental hygiene, with several scenes featuring them flossing. The adults all must have minored in Paranormal Occurrences and How to Deal with It. Overall Ouija was not scary and the extenuating circumstances surrounding the plot were laughable at best.

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  • Regarding the movie itself: it was really bad. I expected more from the lead (she's on one of my favorite shows, Bates Motel), it was all jump scares, there wasn't any buildup, and it's predictability was unparalleled. If you're looking for a scary Halloween movie, run as fast as you can. That being said, if you do plan to see this movie, do so with a large group of very reactive people. Preferably a packed theater. I saw this last night and I was cracking up a lot of the time after I screamed with the crowd and insulted the characters' idiocy. Not 'scary' in the slightest, but was one of the most enjoyable times at the theater I've had.
  • There is the potential for a decent horror flick here.

    Ouija is a classic game that has scared kids for generations. So to make it a prime topic for a horror film is a no-brainer. So what are the chances that the filmmakers actually took the time to write a scary story, or create a scary or intense atmosphere? One would hope so, but this isn't that type of film. Produced by Platinum Dunes, yes Michael Bay's film company, Ouija is a bland, by the numbers horror flick that lacks scares and ups the boredom factor.

    I give the film some credit, it started decent enough, but sooner than later it dives into the horribleness one would expect from a rushed cash grab flick. I find this film to be a prime example of what is wrong with the horror genre these days. I can't recall any characters in this film or what they did. It had people just saying lines to the camera and each other. The scares were boring beyond comprehension. The dreaded PG-13 rating destroys any chance for anything really scary, interesting or bloody.

    Ouija is a failed opportunity, one that could have given us something interesting. I'm not just disappointed in it, I'm embarrassed by it. Ouija is almost an insult to the horror community. Not even the lame third act twist (yes, I'm ruining the fact that there is a twist) is enough to give the film a decent finish.

    It hurts my brain thinking about this film so I'm going to cut this review a bit short.

    Expect to see a sequel sometime soon, just don't 'see' it.
  • Warning: Spoilers
    "Ouija" is somewhat of a paradox of a film. Imagine a movie made by the makers of a game warning you not to play the game. Now imagine the makers of a game warning you not to play it, but double-dog daring you to play it. I've pretty much just described Hasbro's supernatural horror dud "Ouija."

    A girl is mysteriously killed after recording herself playing with an ancient Ouija board. A group of her friends investigate the spirit board. They soon find out some things aren't meant to be played with when they awaken the dark powers of the "other side."

    "Ouija" is one of those movies where the kids involved do incredibly stupid stuff, make all the wrong decisions, and then die because of their bad choices. Unlike most teen slasher films, there's nothing fun or humorous here to be found. It's just one predictably bad action after the next resulting in death for whoever committed the transgression against the dead.

    Set up like a visual instruction manual, "Ouija" teaches you how to play the board game you know you shouldn't. It's like they're taunting you to play with fire. Imagine someone telling you not to do something, but then giving you exact guidelines on how to do it. The actors say the words they're supposed to and follow the rules to communicate with the dead… which is never a good idea, by the way. It all plays out like an over-extended TV commercial to sell the game.

    The ultimate message of "Ouija" is you shouldn't play with the occult. Unfortunately, the message gets a little jumbled up when the friends use it to do battle against the spirits. Okay… so don't use it unless you need to use it to fight the bad guys? Am I getting this right?

    "Ouija is rated PG-13, of course. Why wouldn't it be since its target demographic is plainly teens looking for mild scares. It includes disturbing violent content, frightening horror images, and thematic material.

    Any Christian is going to have problems with watching "Ouija." We're all warned from childhood not to play with the occult or communicate with the dead… and with good reason. It's pretty cut and dry in the Bible. When my wife found out I watched the movie in our home, she made me immediately take it out of the house and put it in the car. The film really does send a mixed message to younger viewers.

    "Ouija" is obviously an attempt at both promoting a Hasbro board game and creating a teen version of "Insidious" or "The Conjuring." However, there's nothing to be found here that is even half as endearing or memorable as either of those two films. Even the little twist during the climax can't save the movie in the end.
  • pendenquejohn18 September 2015
    I usually don't introduce posts in that manner but on this special occasion, it really has to be. And, what really made the deception bigger was the fact that I remember that I paid $10 to watch this movie in a cinema in Puerto Rico (I can't remember if it was Halloween or not, but anyways) when I could have saved myself from such a struggle. Ouija is the pinnacle of the type of movie one would watch while doing something on a side and certainly not pay 100% of his attention towards it -- something well, which is not easy to do in a cinema. Then, you can always leave [...]

    What bothers me primarily is the extreme simplicity that resides into the movie. Secondly, the fact that I was able to anticipate 80 to 90% of the times when the scare was going to fall. At last, the fact that when the scary part DID fall, they were not as scary as I would have expected them to be.

    All I learned after Ouija was that it is the perfect movie to introduce somebody who hates horror movies to the genre but certainly not for intermediate/advanced spectators who love it.

    I remember my reaction at the end of the session and I was like 'what did I just watch' and it seemed like my friends had the same reactions. Unfortunately, I really do not know what to say and don't have much to say from a pure technical standpoint because it's just too simple minded and too predictable to really have anything of note and my post would be filled with unnecessary negatives. I'll just let the my note speak for itself then.
  • I'm not surprised a film got made about a ouija board, and they can make it really good like they do with origins, but this movie is a terrible, cheap concept.
  • This is actually pretty entertaining, okay it wasn't that scary, just a little scary, they're some jump scares here and there, but some the suspense in this movie is pretty good, now I will admit the premise of this movie was pretty stupid, but what do you expect, the movie has a stupid title and a stupid premise, which is about some average teens play a board game known as Ouija, if you remember the Ouija game, you know how to play it, and know the plot, if you don't know I'll tell you plot. After a girl Debbie died, her friends found the board game Ouija, and they start to play it, once they played it, something goes wrong, the game starts to haunt them left and right, when they play or don't play the game, so they have to keep on playing to find the spirit, and put an end to it. For a movie with a dumb idea, I have to admit, it's pretty entertaining, but I have to admit the twist is a little confusing, but the film still gets entertaining to the end. Overall this film is pretty good, it's not great, but it's still good to watch, would I recommend to you guys, yes for people that don't take stupid movies too seriously, you probably enjoy it, like I did, because I didn't take it too seriously, if you did, you may not like it, because it's met to be stupid, so it was so stupid that it was entertaining to watch.
  • I have seen a ton of Horror movies cause Horror is my favorite Genre. Seeing the commercials for this movie, I had to watch it. It seemed scary, and with the Ouija Board, it seemed down-right horrifying. So when it came out on DVD, I went and bought it. Big mistake. The acting was just horrible and lifeless, the plot had so many holes in it which raised more questions than answers. There was a series of movies that centered around a Ouija Board called Witchboard which spawned 2 sequels, great movie, so I thought that this movie was going to be just as good as the Witchboard movies, but I was wrong, it was the complete opposite. I am a trooper when it comes to movies, even bad movies, so I watched all of the way through, or shall I say that I have survived the movie cause it was just so, so boring. If you want to see a horror movie about an Ouija Board, watch Witchboard 1-3. Those are good Horror movies.
  • bluesfan271316 November 2014
    I honestly don't know why this movie only has a 4.4 rating. Having looked at that before walking into the theater made me a little apprehensive about buying a ticket but boy was I in for a surprise. This movie keeps you scared the whole way through. Contains lots of creative jump scares and good plot twists. Lin Shaye is excellent as always especially in horror movies. The pace does not seem too slow or too fast and there aren't any long breaks between something scary happening. Having said that this movie does require a bit of imagination as most horror movies do but if you push reality aside for 90 minutes you will not be disappointed. In my opinion this is a well-written horror movie that is highly underrated. I would definitely watch it again.
  • Warning: Spoilers
    I'll give a very honest review- starting with the trailer. The trailer was pretty misleading based off the fact that certain things that happened in the trailer wasn't in the movie at all, which is kind of okay, since nothing really spoiled the movie. The beginning of the story was alright, and it didn't catch speed until near the middle to the end - where it got entertaining.

    The story itself was decent, it's not deep (but what horror nowadays is, am I right?) Don't expect the story to be mind-blowing. I will say, I adore Olivia Cooke, who plays the lead in the movie, but she didn't meet my expectations in this movie...her acting was, for a lack of a better word, lacking.

    IF you enjoy jump scares, this movie is definitely for you. Ouija has jump scares through out the movie, which made it a pretty entertaining watch.

    Overall, decent movie, nice jump-scares, okay-acting, but too abrupt of an ending. The movie as a whole was not bad, but the ending was a little disappointing to me. It seemed to end pretty quickly; I wished it was dragged out a little bit longer.

    Should you watch in theaters? Yes, if you are into the jump-scares. It's not the best movie, but it isn't the worst either. Besides that, wait to rent it.

    Ouija had a lot of potential, but I personally thought that it could have been better if they tweaked the ending. There were several unresolved problems, and it's kind of weird that you barely see these kids' parents at all besides the beginning of the movie. Like, seriously, where are these kids' parents?
  • vanessa-naomi19 December 2014
    If I Could give this a lower score than 1, I would. The concept is (particularly in recent years) terribly overdone. There was nothing substantial in this film to make it different or stand out from the rest of the horde of supernatural movies. It seems to be your run of the mill horror film trying to ride on the money train that "paranormal activity" and "the conjuring" created as the new horror standard. Maybe it's just that I expected a lot more from it; especially as it had such great advertising and publicity, however this was a snooze-fest start to end. Even the acting was flat and I cared nothing for any of the characters involved. I definitely have seen worse in terms of budget, concept, etc. but at least they had a certain quirk or charm to them that made them different. In short, it felt like I had already seen this film 1,000 times before. Unfortunately this one happened to be the most boring film I have ever had the displeasure of sitting through.
  • Along with the many unnecessary remakes we get in the horror genre, films made based off of action figures or board games are probably the most unnecessary that I can think of in the film industry. We should completely understand why this genre of film exists though. If you are making these types of films, likely there is a target market already in place for them. These movies don't work though because it's not like your going to have source material for them because the film is only about a game or a doll. One prime example of these problems occurs in the film Battleship. The film feels nothing liking the classic game Battleship due to the characters and plot elements. Whenever I play Battleship, it's not like I am introduced to characters or a plot. The source material of the game is not at all related to the movie elements. Ouija is the latest dip into this genre in 2014.

    Ouija is an infamous spirit board and it's purpose is to talk to the dead and it is self-explanatory why we see ouija boards only in horror films. Films like The Exorcist from 1973 or Paranormal Activity from 2009 are some examples of horror films with Ouija boards. Ouija boards have turned into an urban legend with supposed deaths occurring because of them and this is one reason why my girlfriend hates them with a passion. I am the first one to say that Ouija as it's own movie based off the board would be hard due to because you need a lot of material to support it but it is still an interesting idea none the less. As it turns out, Ouija is enough to get by but still nothing very promising.

    After Debbie Galardi (Shelley Hennig) commits suicide after finding a Ouija board in her room, a group of her closest friends come together to find the reason for her suicide though none of them know that the board itself might be the problem.

    As I said before, this is the type of plot that needs to rely on substance to survive because it is only based off a game board. The substance though here is average at best. Kill scenes we have all seen before, pacing that is all over the place and a low budget to the film as evidenced by it's lack of location and sets. Ouija is a film that is put together in a way that makes it come off as very unmemorable.

    The film's downfall can also go back to the characters. Casting teenagers in these PG-13 horror films is already the norm but in the end, there is really nothing here to see from the cast. There is no substance whatsoever to the characters and they are made in a way that makes you not like or dislike them. They are characters you just watch waiting for the ending. Even Lin Shaye shows up as Paulina Zander, a character that has an interesting backstory to film. This backstory though that feels like a last minute idea and comes into the film too late. The maid of the house played by Vivis Colombetti is quite underused and is a big waste of an idea and a character.

    Much like the film Mama from last year or other horror remakes, Ouija is a slumber party film for teenagers girls to get scared who do not know about good horror films yet or will never know. You could even say it is also a film meant to watch with your significant other because at theater for my showing, the place was filled with nothing but couples. Ouija is the type of horror film that I can choose to forgot and will certainly forgot about once I pick the best horror films from 2014.
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