![]() Supposedly, their amateurish attempt to contact the Other Side was enough to irk the currently deceased previous owner of the house and now they’ve got that to deal with. In any case, they fumble through the séance with some melodramatic reactions to flickering lights and that’s that. Wait, what are you doing? You can’t even see what the ghosts are trying to spell! How could they even move the stupid cup with all your hands on it? This isn’t supposed to be a tug-o’-war with the netherworld, guys. An empty glass would work in a pinch, though…Īnd now all that’s left is for each person to put a finger on the glass, ask questions of the spirit world, and let the spooky ghosts practice their spelling… They’ve got the ouija board but, sadly, it didn’t come with a planchette (which happens to be the official name of the pointer-thingy that helps our spectral friends spell their words). Getting back to the titular “séance” which really only takes about 30 seconds in the movie. To be honest, that was the biggest surprise in this movie.īut, I digress. That ouija board, for one, and everything else in the spooky “witchcraft room” the protagonists find was believable and well done. While everything else around them was suffering from an anemic budget and an accelerated timeline, the props department managed to put together some great stuff. It was this ancient-looking, slice-of-tree thing they found when poking around the old house…Īnd, in all fairness, let me just take this time to give kudos to the props department (props to the kudos department?) responsible for Ouija Seance. With that as a lead-in, you’d expect some sort of familiarity with the concepts. The words are right there in the title of the movie “ouija” and “séance”. And don’t even get me started on the “séance”. Our four main characters, though? They all come off as mercurial ass-hats whose reactions to things are either blown way out of proportion or just plain bizarre. Sure, he creeps around a bit in the beginning, but deep down he’s good people. First of all, the only character even remotely likable is the axe-wielding caretaker. The writing is at the core of most of the horribleness. As is pretty common with these films, Ouija Seance fails spectacularly on nearly every front. Notice I said “attempts” to follow the formula. It also did well with moviegoers and that’s exactly the kind of pattern a mockbuster studio looks for.Įnter Ouija Seance: The Final Game (2018).įilmed in Italy (an homage to the glory days of the spaghetti western?) using an English-speaking cast, Ouija Seance attempts to follow the tried-and-true ouija board movie formula: get a group of young adults, put them in a room with a ouija board, unleash something evil, and watch the ensuing mayhem. It managed to pull in a respectable sum at the box office and earned itself a follow-up, Ouija: Origin of Evil (2016). For example, back in 2014, Blumhouse helped produce Ouija. What you often see are copies of legitimate movies that have done well enough to spawn a sequel or two. The horror genre is no stranger to this treatment it just doesn’t have nearly as many blockbusters to play with. Their Independents’ Day (2016) hit the market on June 7th so it would be all set up to ride the swell from Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) which came out June 24th. ![]() Their Atlantic Rim: Resurrection (2018) was put out on February 15th, just a few weeks before the March 23rd release of Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018). One of the masters of this practice is The Asylum studio. ![]() Its sole purpose being to ride the wave created by whatever giant Hollywood epic it copies. ![]() Traditionally, the mockbuster title is rushed to market a few weeks before the real movie’s release date. Also known as knockbusters or “drafting opportunities” (in the racing sense, not architecturally speaking - sorry, Eric), these movies tend to be micro-budget projects thrown together in record time and then given titles that sound similar to legitimately huge movies. Welcome to the wonderful world of mockbusters. I doubt they were talking about these movies, though. “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” or so the saying goes. 1/2 out of ★★★★★ Beware the “mockbuster”: landmine of the cinematic landscape. ![]()
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