Nerds That Geek Movie Review - 'Ouija Seance: The Final Game'

Written by John Edward Betancourt

If there’s one thing that intrigues me about family in general, it’s the sheer fact that we truly never know everything there is to know about our extended family. Our aunts, our uncles and even our grandparents are people we tend to see far less than our nuclear family and because of that, our impressions and knowledge of them is strictly driven by our parents and the stories they tell us about that particular family member growing up, and what’s even more amazing is that sometimes, we never see them at all, making what our folks tell us about them, all the more critical.
 
Which means that when they pass into the great beyond, we often learn many a great thing we never knew about them, and sometimes that’s good and sometimes that’s bad and when we learn the negative, we often press our parents as to why they didn’t tell us about such matters sooner and the answer to that question, is always the same…they merely wanted to protect us, and thus, the matter is closed and we move on in life. But, what if our parents kept the truth from us in order to protect more than our mental image of people we grew up with? What if there was a real danger in knowing that a true dark side existed in our relatives? Would we seek out more knowledge when it comes to these ugly facts, or would we thank our parents for keeping us in the dark, and it just so happens that these questions are explored in the horror film, Ouija Séance: The Final Game.
 
Now, the plot for this particular film is pretty darn straightforward. Because in this movie we meet a young woman named Sarah who leads a pretty average and happy life. She’s studying abroad, she’s surrounded by good friends and she’s about to inherit a ton of money since her grandmother, a person she never knew growing up, recently passed away and left her estate to Sarah, and she is more than happy to sell the place off and all she has to do to secure the funds, is drop off a little paperwork at the estate and the money is hers. But, this seemingly simple task leads to quite the complicated adventure. Because the party she and her friends were planning to attend after dropping the papers off was just cancelled, meaning that her buddies want to stay at her Grandmother’s place for the weekend and truly, they could not make a poorer choice. Because the group is about to learn that grandma was hiding some evil secrets, and they’re about to unleash something sinister that will stop at nothing to get its hands on their souls…

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​So, let’s just get this out of the way now. There are some glaring flaws when it comes to this motion picture, and I wanted to make mention of that up front because if you settle in to watch this one, I don’t want anyone to feel as though they’ve been duped into believing that this is the Citizen Kane of horror films. But while that sounds like I’m about to go off on this movie and tear it to shreds, that would be incorrect because while this film isn’t flawless, it has its merits, and much of that is made possible by way of the key concepts presented in this story; facing one’s fears, facing one’s past and of course what we discussed at the beginning of the article, discovering and dealing with some shocking surprises about one’s family and those concepts are handled in fascinating fashion by way of the main character Sarah.
 
Because in essence, we find Sarah at a crossroads at her life in this story, since it seems as though she’s desperately looking for meaning when we first meet her on the anniversary of her mother’s death and it was downright incredible to watch her come to life once she started learning more about her family, regardless of how bad the facts turned out to be and it was equally as fascinating to see how desperate she was to make peace with her past and her family’s twisted history because you simply don’t see that kind of character arc in horror too often these days and if by chance you do, it’s usually forgotten once the wild stuff starts to go down. But while this was the selling point of the movie for me, its greatest strength is also what turned out to be its greatest weakness.
 
Unfortunately, at times the story focuses too heavily on Sarah and not enough on the mystery that’s surrounding her family and her ultra-evil grandma and well, this is the kind of story that needed to give us that backstory at some point to make Sarah’s journey as fulfilling as possible. But, by no means do the film’s flaws make it downright unwatchable. There are some genuinely creepy moments in here, in fact I loved the chilly sequence that followed the séance, and there’s some good splatter to be found later in the feature as well and really, this movie is a solid way to kill an hour and a half. So, if you’re looking for something to entertain, watch this one with zero expectations and you’ll do just fine because it really is a solid little character study with some evil thrown in for good measure. 

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