Sadly Over-hyped

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Writer/Director Kevin S. Tenney returns in this sequel to his 1987 original. Introducing new characters, this story centers around a young woman named Paige (Dolenz) who has left her boyfriend Mitch (Gibbs) to see if she is the artist she thinks she is. She rents an artist's loft to paint, but finds the Witchboard and begins playing it alone. She contacts the spirit of Susan (Julie Michaels) who was the former resident of her loft and heavy into the occult. Susan communicates to Paige that she was murdered which causes Paige to do some checking on her own of Susan's death. Paige slowly becomes obsessed with the case and the board and gets caught in progressive entrapment like Lynda from the original film did. Unlike the original film in this series, Tenney makes this a story of revenge with Susan's spirit doing the dirty work. Along the way she takes out a handyman and his stuck in the 60's wife Elaine (Newman) in grisly fashion. Elaine's death could be the best of the movie has a giant wrecking ball smashes her into and through her VW Bus she's standing in front of. Like in the original, Tenney has is camera swoop around the apartment in wide angle to show the point of view of the spirit, and once again it is effective. Composer Denis Michael Tenney delivers a well done score that enhances the action on screen. Some good jump scares are included in the form of some intense dream sequences, but some of the original films atmosphere is sadly missing. The revenge plot line just doesn't allow for as many scare opportunities as the first film did. Still, this sequel is a worthy effort and Tenney supplies some good supernatural moments to entertain and scare the audience. There is a great final scene which involves the first films star Todd Allen playing Jim with his friend, also from the original Kenny Rhodes as Mike as garbage men as Jim is telling Mike that Linda just had a baby and they named it Brandon. Cool homage to the original.

Yes, I'm only giving this a 4/10 but I still enjoyed watching this movie, and if crappy horror movies are your thing, then you'll have to watch this too.Anyway, there really, really, really needed to be more boobs in this movie - there wasn't any! The main character girl appears kinda sexy in some scenes, but that's it. She wears the exact same clothes during a large portion of the movie too, its weird, it clearly was a few days in the film and she still is wearing the same clothes, idk wtf up wit dat. Also, it would have been better with a lot more gore, there really isn't any until the end. And her voice gets really annoying. The worst part by far is the guy who played Russell, wow he sucks! His acting is by far the scariest thing in this movie.

I didn't care much for Kevin S. Tenney's Witchboard: the script was weak, the acting was lousy (Tawny Kitaen, who played the central character, was more wooden than the Ouija board itself!), and the effects were cheap. However, this sequel, also by Tenney, is thankfully a lot better.Sure, the plot isn't that original (essentially being little more than a retread of the first film), but Tenney seems to have polished his skills as a director a little, and has been wise enough to get himself a cast who can actually act.This time around, it's a pretty young artist named Paige (Ami Dolenz) who discovers that meddling with the occult is not a good idea; she finds a Ouija board in the new loft apartment that she is renting, and, pretty soon, people are dying in mysterious circumstances, and she's becoming a foul mouthed sex-bomb (well, maybe not all the effects of a Ouija board are bad). Is the spirit she has been contacting attempting to possess her body, or just trying to bring to justice those responsible for her death?Occasionally events get a little too silly (the scene where a man is pursued by a whirling saw blade is awful), but, on the whole, this is a step in the right direction for the series. Dolenz is easy on the eye (and her hair isn't quite as 'big' as Kitaen's), there are some reasonable jump scares, and Tenney throws in some quite impressive camera-work (a couple of moments might even give Dario Argento a run for his money, with the camera swooping down through a building window into the loft apartment, and, even better, passing through a moving car).

Spoilers herein.A truth about horror films is that you don't really visit the world of the story as much as the mind of the filmmaker(s). If there is a strange and scary mind there, you get creeped out. If it is skewed in some way, you can pick it up if there is any competence at all.In this case, we have a story about a haunting, and the camera is placed so that we do that haunting. The story is irrelevant. Everything is focused on the apartment and the sailing ghostly eye that observes. We become the ghost.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.