I do it to myself every year, without fail. In a bid to explore the full range that the horror genre has to offer me, I inevitably pick something that should never have been plucked from the bottom of the barrel. Ouija Death Trap (AKA Spirits, apparently) is that movie for this year. It was so bad that I almost decided against writing about it, because I know that other people will read this review and think "it can't be THAT bad" before then forcing themselves to endure it, but there are one or two aspects that a) save it from being THE worst of the worst, and b) are worth discussing.
Here's the plot. Four young people head into a building with video cameras at the ready. That's it. The building is supposedly haunted. There is one main male character and three females. And they get a fright when they wander about in darkness and bump into a janitor (played by John O'Hara). Things really start to get wild when the janitor leaves though, with things doing much more than just going bump in the night. Spirits are seen, panic starts to build, and it isn't long until people start to disappear.
Here's the best thing about Ouija Death Trap. It has a runtime even shorter than the 90 minutes listed on IMDb, by the time you account for the titles and end credits.
There are some things to enjoy here, especially for a film viewer very easy to please (me, that's me). The practical effects throughout aren't too bad, and the scares are enjoyably overt and ridiculous. This isn't a film that wants to develop a creepy atmosphere with a slow build to whatever the finale might deliver. This is a film that wants to throw you into a real, funfair-style, house of horrors.
That's all my positivity used up though. The first thing that puzzles me about this film is how it took THREE people to write it. I'm amazed there's a script in the first place, and maybe Amanda Payton, Johnnie Reed, and director Todd Sheets spent most of their time plotting the scares, relying on their cast member to come up with decent dialogue while they reacted to the events unfolding around them. That was a mistake, and I defy anyone to watch this entire film and then tell me even one bit of dialogue that felt as if it was placed in the movie with even the smallest amount of care and consideration.
It might have helped if the people onscreen were better at acting. William Christopher Epperson, Jessica Hopkins, Dakota Lassen, and Raven Reed may be lovely people, but good actors they are not. Nor is O'Hara. You would think that one out of five would justify their inclusion in the cast, but that's not the case. I won't single anyone out for extra criticism, especially as the acting is uniformly poor from everyone, but there was one cast member who easily ranks as one of the absolute worst performers I have seen in a feature film.
Maybe it's not their fault. Maybe these people signed up for something that they then realised wasn't going to be worth their time or energy. The plot, what little there is of it, is bloody awful, the camerawork is painfully bad (with the excuse, of course, that we're just seeing the footage shot by the characters onscreen), and the end result is a feature so lazy and slapdash that most viewers will feel a mix of anger and relief when it's all over.
Better actors might have made this much more bearable, but we'll never know. As it is, I've been generous with my rating because of those easy jump scares. And if you don't think I've been generous . . . that just proves that you haven't seen the film.
2/10
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