Ouija

So far I'm impressed with what I've seen of Olivia Cooke, who was in two recent films: Thoroughbreds and Ready Player One, and was very good in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl from a few years ago. I was in the mood for a dumb horror movie and she's made a few--they will be the little embarrassments on her resume after she hits it big.

One of them is Ouija, from 2014, which, no kidding, is based on the Hasbro board game. Hasbro, of course, had to give permission for the use of the board, but if this movie were true they might have quite the liability suit on their hands.

The movie starts with two little girls playing with the board, but nothing evil happens. We do here some important rules, though: don't play it alone, don't play it in a graveyard, etc. Flash forward several years, when the girls are in high school. Deb (Shelley Hennig) has played it alone and awakened some ghosts in her house. She ends hanging from the ceiling.

Cooke is her best friend and along with some friends try to figure out what happened to Henning. The ghosts are a ten-year-old girl with her lips sewn shut and her screaming mother, but just who is the bad one is left until the end of the film.

The film is directed by Stiles White without much flair. The scares are minimal, and the plot fairly obvious. When we spend a few seemingly pointless minutes with a boy struggling with a pool cover, we can bet he'll end up drowning in it before the end of the movie.

But I will say Cooke is very good, though she has to do some dumb things.