Imagine if you went into the Amityville Horror knowing that Ouija boards were a terrible idea. The kids in this movie have no illusions about whether or not they should be using a Ouija board, but they go ahead and use them anyway. In the real world, it wouldn't make any difference, but these people are in a movie! If you look around and notice that you're in a movie, just put the Ouija board down and walk away.
Olivia Cooke has been billed as a modern-day scream queen after her roles in this movie, The Signal, and The Quiet Ones. I recognized her from the Bates Motel TV series, so she appears to have a favorite style project, and that's horror. Low-budget horror? Yes, it appears so. This movie cost $5 million to make but staggeringly raked in $103.5 million at the box office alone. I'm not sure what cost $5 million in this movie, and I'm not sure who paid all that money to see it in the theater. I can only assume that guys took their dates to this movie in the hopes of some jump scares.
Jump scares are most of what we get in this movie. I guess this is what we should have come to expect from modern-day horror. We get cheap jump scares and occasionally gross effects but none of the creeping horror that you go to these movies to see in the first place. With a few exceptions, we are either going that direction or the God awful found footage style movies. So, I suppose this movie could've been worse; they could have done found footage style. I think the biggest problem at this point is that this movie made so much money that they're likely going to come out with a sequel that's going to be even worse.
Lin Shaye actually brought some quality acting to the movie, but even if this movie had wall-to-wall good actors, and even if the storyline could be salvaged, the underlying problem of the cheap jump scares draining the audience of their will to be afraid would still have doomed this movie. Fact is, Lin is the only one who put in a noteworthy performance. Everyone else tried, but there just wasn't anything in it.
It's not the worst movie I've ever seen. It's not even the worst horror movie I've seen recently, but I don't think that movie studios should be rewarded for putting out movies that are mediocre at best. That's how we got into this whole Transformers, Transformers 2, Transformers 3, etc... problem. If mediocre movies are all that a studio can produce, then that studio needs to stop producing movies. I think we, the audience, have a responsibility to not encourage them to aim at the lowest common denominator.
Acting was passable
Direction was weak
Story was very weak
Scares were cheap and fleeting
Cinematography wasn't bad.
Bottom Line; It will likely be better than the sequel.
1.0/5