Isn’t there something better that five hot teens can be doing, that rhymes with “porgy”?

Ouija: the bored game.

Five teens try to contact their dead friend through a ouija board. And guess what? They do.

OUIJA is needless jumpscares, hot teens and a mindless horror story. Hell, boys, we got ourselves some funding!

Olivia Cooke is Laine, whose best friend Debbie (Shelley Hennig) hangs herself one night in a fit of uncharacteristic blondeness. Having flirted with a ouija board as kids, Olivia somehow arrives at the notion that using the ouija to contact dead Debbie will allow dead Debbie to identify her real killer. Uh, royt…

Cooke’s acting actually sells this plot point, the least intrusive stupidity in this movie rife with it. (Cooke is the new Rose Byrne, that underpinning of gravitas, overlaid with an inconspicuous hotness that creeps up on you rather than slams you backwards.) At least when characters here walk into dark rooms without turning the lights on, they’re using their meager cellphone flashlight to light the way into jumpscare. Cellphones that never get any signal when they need to call for help the most. (Obviously Sprint). But if we think there’s an underlying “reality” to this modern Young Adult panderer, just wait till people are being pulled screaming into black passageways and the reaction of the remaining teens is akin to browsing facebook.

Lin Shaye, from INSIDIOUS, is back from The Further and wheelchair-bound in a mental home. She’s that person with The Ghost Backstory that ruins every horror movie; this one about a mother ghost sewing her daughter ghost’s mouth shut, because they needed the jumpscare.

Gathering her teen squad of boyfriends and chicks too smooth for their own good (Daren Kagasoff, Douglas Smith, Ana Coto and Bianca Santos), Laine organizes a séance with the ouija and uncovers secret passageways, dead bodies, angry ghosts and other tropes that used to scare us when we were nine. Seriously, there’s even an old female Mexican housekeeper that warns Laine, “Don’t go seeking answers from the dead!” Oh no, they d’int!

When Laine uncovers the dead daughter’s body in an attic (by now we’ve forgotten about the blond chick who hanged herself), she cuts the threads sewing the daughter’s mouth shut– wait, don’t you sew through a person’s SKIN? When the skin deteriorates in death (firstly, no one has smelled these corpses up here?) wouldn’t the threads deteriorate also? Apparently not, as Laine is instructed by Lin Shaye Ghost Whisperer to cut through threads seemingly sewed through the skull of this poor girl. Threads cut, at which point the little girl ghost starts screaming, which drives the insane mother ghost away and–

–is anyone taking OUIJA seriously at this point?…

END