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).
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).