OUIJA

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SURPRISES

It's perhaps expecting too much of modern horror B-movies aimed at the multiplex trade to pull any surprises, but this one has a doozy during the end credits. For most of the time it's a perfectly decent little movie in the creepy rather than gory traditions, following the domestic scares of Insidious and The Conjuring (and their less effective followups): more than enough of those "can't look, must look" sequences in which teens poke around in the recesses of one of those improbably large American houses, to which it was all I could do to not shout out "Don't go in the attic!", "Don't go in the basement!" or "Don't wander off down that scary underpass!".

Or indeed, "Don't play with the ouija board in the house where your best friend died mysteriously after playing with the very same ouija board!" Ouija has a very simple set-up in which a group get together to summon the spirit of their recently departed friend Debbie - however, it's not her they make contact with, but a young girl known as DZ, still lingering in the house and apparently still terrorised by her mother. Were these ghosts responsible for Debbie's unlikely suicide? And can they cleanse the house of its evil past, even as they get bumped off one by one?

There aren't any real surprises in Ouija: it's a formulaic Boo! effort straight from the template and it has no interest in doing anything other than making you jump every so often, which it manages more than adequately. (Granted, it's a pity no-one in the film knows how to pronounce ouija properly, referring to it throughout as weegie.) One pleasant development is that somehow they've managed the trick of making a modern horror movie without gracing any of the characters with negative traits. No-one swears, takes drugs, starts fights, gets drunk or cheats on their partners, no-one behaves like a swaggering sexist douchebag or a hyper-sexualised bitch. They're all reasonable people, which pays dividends in terms of audience sympathies when it comes to killing some of them off because you don't actually want them to die.

But the big surprise comes at the end. Because they started the film straight away with just the Universal logo, and left off the obligatory handful of animated production company idents, it wasn't until the credits ran at the end that I realised this was a film from Platinum Dunes, the company behind the recent rash of wildly variable horror remakes including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare On Elm Street and Friday The 13th (not variable between good and bad, but between bad and very bad). Yes: Ouija is a film that has the sticky fingermarks of Michael Bay on it yet still manages to not stink the building out like a decomposing skunk. I enjoyed it already but hell, it gets an extra star just for achieving that.

****