Bored Game: OUIJA: ORIGIN OF EVIL

Once you get past the surprisingly pleasurable vintage appeal to Ouija: Origin of Evil, you’re left with a fairly routine, fairly dull little horror movie. Ah, but those vintage affectations are so very pleasurable. I appreciated the effort. Setting the story in 1967, writer-director Mike Flanagan (Oculus) wraps the movie in period detail. It’s like watching an odd Mad Men spin-off slowly sinking into haunting clichés. The costuming and set-design are midcentury on-point. The sound has a warm, soft, soothing vinyl quality. The pacing is soft; the image is quiet. The title cards have era-appropriate fonts. There are even some fake reel changes, perhaps the biggest shock of pleasure the film’s digital projection has to offer those of us who can remember the soft pop of the changeover, preceded by a fleeting black oval in the corner, accompanied by the faint scratches on the soundtrack and the little wobble on the cut. I realize this isn’t much, but it’s worth noting anyway.

The rest of the movie is standard modern horror elements that’ll be familiar to anyone who has seen better recent genre entries like The Conjurings, Insidious, The Possession, and so on and so forth. At least it’s much better than the worse, first attempt to turn Ouija boards into a horror series in 2014’s hacky, forgettable paranormal slasher. Origin of Evil has a frazzled single mother (Elizabeth Reaser) and two troubled girls (Annalise Basso and Lulu Wilson) mourning their father, evil spirits, bad dreams, a kindly priest (Henry Thomas), a nice older boy hanging around (Parker Mack), whisperings, apparitions, a possessive ghost (Doug Jones), things going bump in the night, and a house with a Dark Secret Past. There’s not a single surprising moment in watching these components come together as they add up to pretty much what you’d expect. The younger girl whispers with her new ghost friends after using a Ouija board to attempt contact with her dead dad. Now the whole family is in danger. Would you have it any other way?

Because the movie is rooted in its period – with small talk about the space program, and records spinning, and the soothing glow of black and white TV turning eerie with the late night Indian-head test pattern – there’s often just enough to distract from the conventional machinations of the plot. And the cast plays it like it’s happening to them for the first time, Flanagan giving them enough room to play it straight. The mother is a phony psychic with fake séances for which her daughters hide behind doors and in cabinets to provide some surround sound scrapes and thumps. They begin the movie cynical, inured to the very real supernatural around them, expect for the youngest, who believes too much. This is the setup for an opening, the most vulnerable starting lines of communications with the dead, the others too unbelieving to catch on to the problem before it’s too late. Not even the priest can figure it out before that house is a lost cause.

Once it all goes wrong, the mother tells her oldest daughter to go wait outside. “Splitting up seems like the worst idea,” the teen spits back, the movie’s one winking acknowledgement that we’ve been here before. Even its eeriest moments have echoes of better horror movies past. The little girl serving as a conduit for an evil something-or-other screams by stretching her mouth open with her chin unnaturally low, creepy and reminiscent of the Scream mask. So on a level of story, scares, and invention, it’s pretty much a whiff. It’s the kind of mediocre that, though it’s never all that involving or scary, is at least relatively watchable throughout. Flanagan’s a good enough filmmaker to make the routine pleasing, even comforting in its old-fashioned good looks. But this sort of comfort-food throwback horror runs completely counter to a good movie, removing genuine shocks or the simmering discomfort that burrows under the skin. Think about how James Wan’s Conjurings use period affectations to enhance the mood instead of settling into cinematic comfort food. Ouija: Origin of Evil is just a nice looking and sounding nothing.

Suburban Space Invaders: THE WATCH

Turning out to be nothing more than a belabored, R-rated commercial for Costco (actual dialogue: “They really do have everything we need!), The Watch is a halfhearted action comedy content to do nothing surprising. The story, such as it is, kicks off when the local Costco manager (Ben Stiller) shows up to work one morning to find that the store has overnight turned into a crime scene. The local cop (Will Forte) informs him that the night watchman has been mysteriously murdered. Shaken up, Stiller puts out a call for his sleepy suburb to form a neighborhood watch and is a little disappointed that the only people who respond are a needy middle aged motormouth (Vince Vaughn) who just wants a break from intruding upon his teenager’s social life, an awkward wannabe vigilante (Jonah Hill), and a bumbling British man (Richard Ayoade) who wants to join a group to fit in with the locals.

Eventually it turns out that the murderer is an alien who is simply one of many who are already in the town, poised to phone home and start the invasion proper. So, it’s up to the four flawed guys to stop the space creatures before they can move forward with their plan. Not that the film gathers any momentum from this threat. No, the movie just meanders through typical moments of male gross-out humor bonding, stumbles into a lame Invasion of the Body Snatchers lite and then lazily gets up the effort to squeak out a typical shoot-‘em-up climax.  Altogether it feels like the result of letting a bad Apatow knockoff write and direct a Hollywood remake of Attack the Block. It’s lazily paced, painfully predictable and unimaginative in all aspects, like two faded copies of copies placed one over the other.

It didn’t have to be this way. The talent involved here is promising. The cast is made up of funny, skilled performers and I haven’t even mentioned Rosemarie DeWitt, relegated to a thanklessly underwritten role as Stiller’s wife, or Doug Jones, the incredible performer behind so many great screen creatures (not the least of which is Pan’s Labyrinth’s terrifying Pale Man) who suits up to play the aliens. But the story, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (of the great raunchy teen comedy Superbad) and rewritten by Jared Stern (of the not-so-great Mr. Popper’s Penguins), is beat-by-beat dull and rote. It feels slapped together in a way that makes everyone involved appear to be shrugging towards paychecks. Everyone on screen has been vibrant and energetic, funny and sympathetic in other roles. Here, though, they’re all playing characters that are thinly sketched and vaguely off-putting while just going through the paces in a movie that can’t quite get its act together. It is witless and lame every step of the way.

The anemic script is certainly the key problem here, but it doesn’t help matters that its tone is so unformed. When it opens on Stiller narrating us through a typical day in the life of his character, the film appears to be sharpening its satirical claws on the gleaming store shelves and perfect suburban subdivisions, looking with scorn upon the hollow homogenized lifestyles of the characters. But, as more characters come into focus and the gears of the plot slowly get up to speed, it’s clear that this movie’s going nowhere fast. Strange detours into the kinky life of a creepy neighbor (Billy Crudup) and a half-formed subplot about a leering teenager (Nicholas Braun) after Vaughn’s daughter sap away momentum and cloud the tone. Are we supposed to actually validate the overzealous behavior of the central characters in so thoroughly, incompetently, poking around where they don’t belong? They’re hard to root for and when the plot resolves, it does so almost by accident.

The biggest disappointment here is the direction from Akiva Schaffer, not because it’s especially bad – it’s slick and competent – but because it’s so devoid of energy and creativity.  After directing so many terrific, hilarious Digital Shorts for Saturday Night Live and the smart-stupid new cult comedy classic Hot Rod, it’s unfortunate to see him deliver something so uninspired. There’s just about nothing here worth talking about or reacting to. I saw the movie amongst a boisterous crowd of people who, as the movie started, fell silent. As the movie played, we stayed silent. Then, a little over 90 minutes later, we all filed out. I went in hoping for a few laughs and left feeling dispirited. It’s not just bad; it’s nothing but missed opportunities all around.