Today's Feature: The Ouija Experiment 2: Resurrection (2015)
I had intended to return from my extended blogging sabbatical two days ago, but was unable to do so because sometimes the internet just goes away for a while when you live in a rural area, often for no discernible reason. Why have I been absent from this long-forgotten blog for these past seven months? Who cares, man?
Let's just move on as I resurrect a little thing I used to do here once upon a time called SCHLOCK-TOBERFEST!!! Okay, so I never actually called what I did SCHLOCK-TOBERFEST!!!, but I think we can all agree that I should have, so from now on I'm just going to pretend that this intermittent review series was always called SCHLOCK-TOBERFEST. Is that all right with everybody? For the next several days leading up to Halloween, I'm going to watch and review some garbage movies currently streaming on Netflix, and maybe Hulu. I haven't planned all of this out.
So anyway, I just watched a movie entitled The Ouija Resurrection, or The Ouija Experiment 2: Resurrection, or The Ouija Experiment 2: Theatre Of Death, depending on whom you ask. Either way, it's technically a sequel to a movie called The Ouija Experiment, which apparently was a found footage movie released in 2011. I've never seen The Ouija Experiment, despite both films being on Netflix, and I do not intend to ever see The Ouija Experiment, after just suffering through The Ouija Experiment 2: Resurrection.
It's also not necessary to watch the original Ouija Experiment to understand the "sequel", because it's not really a sequel at all. It's one of those metafictional humdingers that actually takes place in "the real world" where The Ouija Experiment is a found footage movie that some inept motherfuckers made with their garbage cameras and their garbage actor friends, and it's also inexplicably popular, at least in one shitty little town in Texas that is probably named Tumbleweed Gulch or something equally ridiculous.
The actors from the first movie play themselves in the sequel, reminding me of director Tom Six's The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence, a movie that also takes place in "the real world", featuring the lead actress from the original film playing herself and getting caught up in a situation that eerily mirrors that film's fictional narrative. But the difference between The Human Centipede 2 and The Ouija Experiment 2 is night and day. Say what you will about the content of Tom Six's movies, at least there's a clear artistic vision to his work. You may not agree with his sensibilities, you can even rightly label him a "shock artist" for his deliberately transgressive behavior as a filmmaker, but you can't say he lacks talent.
Israel Luna, director of the Ouija Experiment films, however... but I'm getting off track.
So the actors, playing themselves, are attending a special screening of their "film" at the local haunted movie house, and you can tell this movie is a complete work of fiction because after the screening most of the audience actually sticks around to ask vapid questions to their favorite cast members, including such clever queries as "were you actually scared when you were making that one scene, huhr, huhr, huhr", and they even buy gobs of signed merchandise, including DVD copies of the damned movie. One incredibly enthusiastic fan actually gets her boobies signed by her favorite cast member, that other guy who acted in The Ouija Experiment. Not the lead actor from that movie, because he smartly declined to appear in this tripe, but that other guy. The one who did the thing.
The next night, the cast members host an overnight tour of the haunted movie house for a select group of huge Ouija Experiment fans, and it all goes tits-up when one of the actors, not the other guy but the other other guy, the one who wears that shirt, tries to get in the tight pants of a blonde groupie via Ouija Board seduction in a creepy basement. Their foolish dabbling in the occult (which deliberately mirrors the events of the original film, which I picked up on because I'm not a complete fucking idiot) unleashes a vengeful spirit upon the poor souls trapped in the old timey movie house.
Everybody dies and gets sucked into ghostly wormholes (which is just a thing ghosts do), except for two unfortunate young women with faces so unnaturally blank and expressionless one might make the mistaken assumption that they've each suffered extensive nerve damage and are unable to express human emotion. They're cornered in the creepy basement by the local sheriff, some longhaired goober who graduated from the Tommy Wiseau school of acting, who proceeds to pull down his pants and drop a steaming pile of exposition all over the filthy concrete floor.
We learn that the ghost haunting the movie house is actually the spirit of his dead daughter, being the product of passionate incest between the sheriff and his sister/wife. After his sister/wife died during childbirth, the sheriff grew to despise his daughter for taking the love of his life away from him, so he hid her away from the world, locking her up in the basement of a movie theater, because that makes absolutely no sense. It's not like the theater was abandoned for years or anything so convenient. No, the place has been in regular use for decades, so I don't understand how the sheriff got away with keeping his feral daughter locked away in the bowels of the building for so long, since it's revealed that she died as a young adult and not a small child.
Also, the sheriff killed people and fed them to his daughter from the beginning, which makes even less sense. He could have just fed her anything else and it would have made more sense, but I guess she had to be a cannibal, too. Why? Because it's scarier if she's a cannibal ghost, obviously. Don't be stupid. The sheriff eventually sobered up and decided that he was done playing jailer for his unholy spawn, so instead of just shooting her with his service revolver and putting her out of her misery, he chose to leave his daughter to starve to death alone in the theater basement over the course of several weeks, which as we all know is the good Christian thing to do.
But the sheriff sees her supernatural resurrection as an opportunity to be the perfect daddy he failed to be the first time around, which is sweet, and he wants to start his long road to redemption by killing a couple scared girls and feeding him to his ghostly kin, but none of this makes any fucking sense. At this point, the feral ghost incest daughter, who had spent the majority of the movie roaming freely around the theater, murdering terrible actors with goofy jump scares and sucking them into horribly rendered computer generated whirlpools, is now a flesh and blood creature, once again chained to the basement wall. There's never any explanation for this. The audience is just expected to accept this nonsense.
The feral ghost incest daughter is even dispatched by the final girl with a big knife. That actually works. She's just stabbed to death, and that's it. The sheriff is killed with the same knife, but who even gives a shit? Who even gives a shit about anything in this movie? It's just such a complete fucking waste. The whole thing looks like it was shot on a Go Pro camera, and not the new Go Pro cameras, but the older ones that nobody likes because any footage captured in low-light conditions looks like it was shot with a VHS camcorder. The dialogue was seemingly captured entirely with whatever substandard on-board microphones the cameras were packaged with, sounding thin and tinny, often washing out in sequences featuring excess background noise, which is always the hallmark of a quality production.
And could somebody explain to me why The Ouija Experiment 2: Resurrection is shot like a found footage movie? The first movie, which is recapped during the sequel's opening titles sequence, was found footage, so it had an excuse for looking and sounding like consumer-grade garbage. The sequel, despite being framed as a more straight-forward narrative, looks and sounds just like its found footage predecessor, with members of the cast at times looking directly into the fucking camera lens, which should be impossible, since this isn't a found footage movie and there shouldn't be a camera lens for the characters to look into in the first place. But no, they keep breaking the fourth wall because nobody knows what the hell they're doing.
Most, if not all of the dialogue, is obviously improvised, with actors constantly stumbling and stammering over their lines, often with a vague look of panic in their eyes, as though they're waiting for their esteemed director to call "cut", which he clearly never does. The movie is only 86 minutes long, but it's all so boring and insipid that it feels like an endless slog. It just refused to end. At no point was I at all entertained by The Ouija Experiment 2: Resurrection. I wish this movie didn't exist. And I regret my return to this blog to review a handful of shitty horror movies. But that's okay, because I'm committed to this bullshit.
So what am I watching tomorrow? I have no idea. But it can't possibly be worse than what I watched today.
YOUR TIME IS RUNNING OUT!
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