Ouija Seance: The Final Game promises a chilling exploration of supernatural horror, but does it deliver? Let's delve into the details of this film, examining its plot, characters, and overall execution.
The Premise
Sarah and her friends decide to spend the weekend at an old villa Sarah mysteriously inherited. After finding an Ouija Board in the attic, Sarah and her friends unknowingly awaken an evil force connected to the villa’s hidden secrets. The main character Sarah and her friends planned a trip to her family home in the villas.
Plot Overview
The story picks up in a University in Florence, Italy where Sarah (Katharina Sporrer) the beautiful and studious, is studying art restoration. Sarah’s mother has passed and left her a large mansion in the woods. This wouldn’t be that much of a thing, but well, a mysterious person phones Sarah to say that she must personally bring some paperwork by the home. En route to the mansion, the party is canceled, thank god they mentioned it, and the group decided to just have their own weekend party at the mansion. They have to deal with creepy one-eyed groundskeeper Dante (Gianfranco Quero) but hey, PARTY!
So, after writer, producer, director Andrea Mugnaini spins the dial on the storyline wheel of fortune we finally land on something. Nothing happens at first. I mean, they DID have to pad the 80 minute run time.
The home is old and creepy and while searching through the house and cleaning, they find a Ouija board. Sarah and her friends end up stirring up a lot of trouble and uncover some underlying some secrets that are at the villa. Strange things start happening and the gang keeps encountering haunted things throughout the house.
Read also: Cultural impact of the Ouija board
A Critical Look
Ouija Seance: The Final Game has neither seances nor games and certainly, doesn’t seem bent on being the final anything. It IS a recycled TV movie with little aim aside from filling time. This isn’t the worst that Redbox may have to offer but, really?
Ouija Seance: The Final Game is a lazily written spooker featuring performances that range in quality and which are rarely engaging enough for us to care. Shocking, then, that the director of photography did such a beautiful job. This film definitely brought me back to the first time I ever played with a Ouija board. Although my outcome was not as crazy and frightening, I still enjoyed watching the story play out. I really liked the film and how Mugnaini explained the story so well. It kept me on my toes a few times and even made me jump a little.
The fact that she knows art, and is in Italy is just a smokescreen for the predictable plot ahead. We are never sure where she is from. The plan is to go off to a party that night with two gents from school. However, the plot continues to throw errant points at us like shards from a woodchipper.
There’s something really gleeful about old-school, schlocky horror movies like the Leprochaun franchise or the gazillion Friday the Thirteenth / Jason sequels. Their mix of bad effects, poor acting, and mindless terror make them a blast to watch, even if they’re objectively shite. Unfortunately, as of late there have been fewer and fewer so-bad-they’re-good horror movies hitting VoD or Netflix, with most attempts simply being bad (see the Bye-Bye Man). So, when Ouija Seance: The Final Game got announced with its sequel-esque title and its Ringu-meets-the-Exorcist front cover, I was excited. This was going to be 80 minutes of non-stop horror tropes, silly incarnation passages, and a boatload of bad decisions (on the part of both me and the characters).
Character Dynamics
The movie follows about 50% of the characters from the video game Until Dawn: the ex-boyfriend, the jock, the, err, promiscuous one, and the Good Guy, as they decide to spend a few days in a creepy old house. Unlike Until Dawn, which was full of great actors and had a healthy dose of irony, Ouija Seance does nothing to flesh out these characters beyond their basic traits. But hey, I didn’t watch this film to feel things about people; I watched this film to laugh as human meat bags got possessed or scoffed or mutilated or whatever by some putrid abomination.
Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board
Ouija Seance attempts to scare the audience in one of two ways: by playing loud noises, and by showing shadows moving across the backdrop of scenes, accompanied by loud noises. That’s pretty much it. Despite Ouija Seance’s title, I can only think of two or three scenes in which something vaguely paranormal happens. The actual entity that should have been the crux of the film only ever appears in shadow, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but moves like Morph from SMart.
To call this movie a cookie-cutter film would do a disservice to cookie-cutter films, and would also take me well over my recommended daily limit of biscuit analogies. At least cookie-cutter films have content to speak of, generic as it may be. Ouija Seance simply doesn’t.
Cast: Alan Cappelli Goetz, Katharina Sporrer and Holly Mumford star in the film Ouija Seance: The Final Game.
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Read also: Enigmatic Ouija Board