In adapting its same-named board game to the big screen with Ouija, toymaker Hasbro has taken an interesting marketing approach: Those Ouija boards we sell? They will fucking kill you!

After her BFF jacks around with the satanic tool and then promptly — and fatally — hangs herself with Christmas lights, the mousy Laine (Olivia Cooke, The Quiet Ones) gets the bright idea to gather their friends and contact the dearly departed via the Ouija; malevolent spirits awaken.

If watching people play Ouija sounds dull, that’s because it is. Scenes of such mark countless horror films — Witchboard and Paranormal Activity, just off the top of my head — but here, first-time director Stiles White (screenwriter of 2005’s equally blah Boogeyman) has made a feature full of them. Too bad dialogue like “Are you pushing it?” and “Wasn’t me, I swear!” carries neither the stakes nor the suspense as when Rosemary Woodhouse dug out the Scrabble tiles.

With a PG-13 rating that suggests how little it tries, Ouija is a thoroughly unimaginative entry in the Dead Teenager subgenre. To call its characters one-note is not just too kind, but one level too many; they’re underdeveloped to the point of barely being introduced. Each exists solely for the purpose of receiving the message “HI FRIEND” from one step beyond. (The supernatural force doing the writing goes to so much trouble to deliver the greeting, you’d think it’d at least make the effort to include the needed comma between the two words.)

Ultimately, the only unsettling sight of Ouija is having to sit through two scenes of women flossing their teeth. Ick! If the spirit moves you to watch this one, point your internal planchette toward “NO.” —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Taking an analog-inspired cue from the V/H/S anthology franchise, Hi-8: Horror Independent Eight goes even further down the scale of format quality, with each of its eight segments (wraparound included) shot on fullscreen video. Rather than coming from today’s mumblecore world, Hi-8’s contributors herald from an even more lo-fi movement: regional horror flicks shot on video (SOV). If you’ve so much as heard of their work — Cannibal Hookers, Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death, Mulva: Zombie Ass Kicker! among them — you’re predisposed to have interest in viewing this “all-star” experiment.

A typed-on-computer title card warns (read: promises) “overt gore and unbearable suspense”; Hi-8 delivers on exactly one of these, and overall results are scattershot as a pulsating sprinkler with no adjustable range. On the plus side, Tim Ritter (Truth or Dare? A Critical Madness) charts the “complicated” relationship between a wife and her husband, who happens to be a rapist / serial killer. On the minus side, Chris Seaver (Return to Blood Fart Lake) turns in a three-character piece that plays stalker rape for comedy. Ha?

Inconsistency is Hi-8’s only constant: Tony Masiello’s tale of “a lost SOV” titled Bloodgasm has a decent setup and a poor payoff, whereas Todd Sheets (Zombie Bloodbath) follows a radio DJ in an EC Comics-style story with a decent payoff and a poor setup. Among the project’s octet of shorts, the best doesn’t even try for shocks — just laughs. Genuinely LOL-hilarious, it’s from The Vicious Sweet’s Ron Bonk, who simultaneously sends up George A. Romero and 1980s-style action by plopping a Snake Plissken-esque he-man amid an attack of the undead on his Nana’s nursing home.

The entire exercise ends with a list of the eight rules each filmmaker had to follow — only practical effects allowed, wind noise encouraged, etc. — and this should have appeared at the start just to prep the unsuspecting / uninitiated as to what they could expect from the whole of Hi-8. Those not used to SOV “epics” will have a really tough time with it. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.