Israel Luna’s IMDB biography says that the first film he ever saw was The Exorcist, at age five. Poor guy. I don’t think he’s recovered. The former Dallas-residing writer/director’s latest movie – the follow-up to the fantastically titled Ticked-Off Trannies with Knives – is The Ouija Experiment, a low-budget, hack-snore, that takes a half-ass swipe at the Paranormal Activity formula and delivers a nearly unwatchable, dull, and senseless succession of jump-out scares drowning in YouTube banality.
Set in a depressingly under-furnished East Dallas house, a few “actors” mouth-off for a handheld camera that captures their ouiga board experiment and subsequent haunting, not to mention the grating and inane romantic subplots. The rules of ouiga, as we are told, is that you can’t leave a board without saying “goodbye” to the spirit. Otherwise, the spirit is going to haunt you. So, guess what happens? The ghosts start appearing in the shadows (exactly where you expect them to be), and thanks to a very thinly stretched premise, the five characters always have camera in hand to catch the spooks. The murder can’t begin soon enough. Put this movie out of its misery, ghosts!
Unfortunately, Luna drags us along through a succession of failed jumps only to then over explain the haunting with even more hackneyed back story, culminating – if that is a word that belongs anywhere near this flat, momentum-less plummet – in a black-and-white flashback that is somehow camp-less camp, kitsch-less kitsch, just witless, mind-numbing, and cynical. The Ouija Experiment’s most palatable moments come when two of its leading males strip and tease the camera, an almost-YouTube parody, if only this wasn’t a movie only fit for YouTube. But at least in these moments there is something snide and self-effacing, suggesting that Luna should forget the spirits and stick with the trannies. Ed Wood, he is not.
