Review: Ouijageist

It took me several days to formulate my thoughts on Ouijageist. Watching it was an interesting experience, as I really enjoyed parts of it, but had a hard time with others. Did I like the movie? Did I dislike it? I wasn't sure.

The film is about a single mother and her baby girl who move into a new flat (this takes place in England) and discover a Ouija Board buried in the garden. Obviously bad things start to happen.

I appreciated how it comes out the gate, guns blazing, with a series of tragic "accidents" that cost some of the characters their lives, and seriously injures others. All within the first half hour. Director John R. Walker and writers Darrell Buxton and Steve Hardy aren't messing around.

And the film does manage to conjure some effective suspense and kills. This is a low, low budget movie (Walker told me in an online chat that the film was made for maybe $10, and they'd lost some funding partners), but Walker tries his best to create a coherent and effective film.

Unfortunately, he can only do so much. There's a couple sequences that just don't work because they didn't have the money to do it right. The sound quality is poor at times, and the performances are uneven.

Certain aspects of the story fall apart if you think about it too much. How come everyone around our main character becomes a target of the evil spirit EXCEPT her mom? Why doesn't our hero just move out of the house? Why won't mom let the landlord tell her daughter she's in mortal danger by staying there? The list goes on and on...

Ouijageist is not without merit. It's the kind of flick you can enjoy on late-night shows like Elvira's Movie Macabre or something similar. It's harmless, and it tries hard, but I'll never see it again. So it's a Bad in our book.

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