A prequel to Ouija (2014), Ouija: Origin of Evil zooms back to a mid-Sixties Los Angeles that's all miniskirts, white PVC boots, splendid chromed-up Chevrolets and Studebakers and clangy garage-band pop music. Our hosts are widowed mom Alice Zander (Elizabeth Reaser, of Twilight fame) and her daughters Lina (Annalise Basso) and Doris (Lulu Wilson).
With Mr Zander having been killed by a drunk driver, Alice and the girls are eking out a living with their fake spiritualist act, conning bereaved punters with bogus spirit visitations, sputtering candles and wobbling furniture. It's an unmitigated scam, and splendid entertainment for us viewers, though Alice likes to believe they're supplying some kind of necessary relief to their needy clientele.
When Lina (pictured above with Doris) goes to a party and gets some shrieky thrills playing the Ouija game (trademarked property of the Hasbro games company, who co-produced the movie), she recommends it to Alice as a great addition to their repertoire. Unfortunately, their fairly harmless racket begins to turn scary and malevolent as younger sister Doris becomes convinced she can contact her dead father via the board. Instead, she turns out to be an open-all-hours gateway for dark spirits to enter. The ouija game's official warning – "Never play alone... never play in a graveyard... always say goodbye" – begins to sound not so much tongue-in-cheek as terrifyingly ominous.
Wilson is precociously good as Doris, starting out both impish and innocently wide-eyed, then growing increasingly weird and unearthly as her invisible "friend" begins to exert more and more control. At first the demonic forces seem almost playful as they do mild stunts like whipping the bedclothes off during the night or moving the ouija pointer round the board unaided, but the ghastliness ratchets up steadily towards a full repertoire of demonic possession's greatest hits.
Some of these deliver an authentic frisson or a jolt of black humour, like the boy in the school playground who learns agonisingly that aiming his catapult at Doris was a big mistake, but director and co-writer Mike Flanagan errs when he lets the gimmicks take over the asylum. Once we start glimpsing pantomimic black demons and seeing Doris doing Exorcist-style levitation stunts while her eyes go glazed and milky, we're into deflating "oh really?" territory.
It's a pity, because the three female leads all deliver strong, plausible performances, and Flanagan could have profited by mining more psychological terrors from his cast trapped in the claustrophobic family home (along with Henry Thomas as the concerned cleric Father Tom) instead of wheeling out the Amityville Horror kit. Introducing a legacy of a Dr Mengele-style Nazi and his victims buried in the basement pushes it beyond poor judgment into bad taste. Still, this movie would be ideal for a Halloween night drive-in.
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