Ouija Japan (2021) User Reviews

Ugh

[BandSAboutMovies · 2/10 · 20 October 2021]

What if you combined a Ouija movie and a riff on Battle Royale? This is a question that I never would have thought to ask but here this movie is to answer.

Karen - yep, that's her name - is an American housewife living in Japan who desperately wants to fit in. This leads her to play Kokkuri-san, which is like Ouija but also astoundingly Japanese in that it summons an animal spirit that is a mix between a fox, dog and raccoon. The fox (kistune) is the trickster, the racoon (bare-danuki) is the bearer of both mischief and fortune, while the dog (inugami) is often used as a curse.

By using three bamboo rods arranged to make a tripod and a pot is placed on the tripod. Three or more people ask questions of the spirit and the pot either moves or remains still, which can be explained away just like a Ouija board. And just like one, this game has plenty of urban legends.

As far as I know, it does not install an app on your phone and give you credits to buy weapons and kill other housewives to the death.

This is director and writer Masaya Kato's first movie as well as the initial effort for much of its cast. It also shifts between bad English and subtitled Japanese and none of the voices match up. All of the blood seems to be CGI. Man, should I keep this laundry list going to let you know just how rough this movie is?

Great idea. Weird idea. Goofy idea. Whatever - the execution fails to live up to what this could have been.

Enjoyable enough for what it is

[kannibalcorpsegrinder · 6/10 · 13 November 2021]

Living abroad in Japan, a transplanted housewife trying to make friends with a local group of women decides to play a special board game with them but once they awake they realize they're being forced to play a game where they kill each other one by one for disrespecting a local deity.

This was a decent enough if flawed genre effort. Among the more likable factors found here is the whole setup of the game and how it works with the girls getting to play together. Using the subject of the Ouija-board-based game with the familiar hallmarks and interplay that makes for an easy immersion into the film despite the cultural difference in the game, the basics here are set up rather nicely leading into the ensuring survivor game that emerges. The idea of installing an app on their phones to aid in the quest that offers the chance at extra lives, weapons, and much more that carries along throughout the film from this starting point is quite fun and ties everything together rather nicely. This kind of setup is what allows the later confrontations with the girls going through the motions of the game and killing each other quite brutally to have a nice sense of fun for them. The brutality and ease with which they head into the gruesome game of hunting each other down have quite an enjoyable atmosphere to it, and a lot of the scenes have some energy to them with the group engaging in a slew of battles using hand-held weapons or gunfights to try to take each other out. Taking place in a confined setting like it does manage to enhance some tension and action here with the films' main action sequences following its build-up in the first half, creating the films' general positives overall. There are a couple of flaws to be had with this one. The biggest factor with this one is the somewhat cliched and underwhelming beginning which is a highly unoriginal and rather dull. The beginning is filled with plenty of utterly familiar and banal drama about the housewives basically running around insulting her for her lack of Japanese or just generally not knowing the culture that's been done to death and isn't very interesting.to see play out in these kinds of films. Not only is it uninteresting but it just adds a sense of dullness to the first half with this series of repetitious scenes coming through again in these types of scenes which stall the film at the very beginning. The other issue here is the film's somewhat obvious lack of funds that makes for some problematic times to be had here. The entirety of the gore throughout the film, with the blood splatter, wounds from the weapons and gunshots or the full-on deaths which occur during the game are handled with some atrocious CGI splotches that are rather terrible looking. In addition, the film also tends to look rather flimsy with the completely obvious inability of the other women in the group to know what they're doing as the slow-motion choreography or the lame stunt-work that tries to showcase the women taking each other out but only exposes the lack of funds for the film, which all end up holding this one down.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Language.