Top 100 Favourite Films: #20-11

#20: Ouija: Origin Of Evil – Even The Other Side has rules

This is one of those films that instantly sounds like a bad idea. The 2013 film Ouija was such a horror non-event that it’s surprising that anyone even cared enough to remember it, let alone try and expand on it. Add to that the influence of producers like the annoyingly prolific Jason Blum of Blumhouse Productions and the reliably dismal Michael Bay, whose studio Platinum Dunes have made the words “horror” and “prequel” synonymous with “run” and “hide”. Enter director/co-writer Mike Flanagan, fresh off of an already unprecedented success with Oculus, who did something that no-one would have expected from a production with this starting point: He put the effort in to make it work.

Top 11 Biggest Surprises (2016)

2016 was a pretty depressing year. Whether you believe in a higher power or not, the incredibly high mortality rate for childhood icons and life-long heroes was enough to make us at least question if someone on-high was trying to mess with us. However, I wouldn’t exactly call this a bad year overall because while the real world may have been rather uninviting, the more creatively inclined definitely got their shit together. Aside from seeing industry titans in the realms of music like Metallica, A Tribe Called Quest and Nick Cave release some of their best material in years, this has also been an astoundingly good year for movies. Not only that, this has been a surprisingly good year in that regard with a lot of films being a lot better than I think anyone could have expected them to be. So, in light of wanting to show 2016 as being far more entertaining than the world seems to have given it credit for, here are my picks for the Top 11 films of 2016 that were far more entertaining than they had any right to be… and in keeping with my last list, chances are that you’re not going to like our first entry.

Ouija: Origin Of Evil (2016) - Movie Review

A couple years back, I looked at a fun little slice of psychological horror with Oculus. Since then, director/co-writer Mike Flanagan has been keeping himself busy. And by "busy", I mean "Good God, how does one person have that much motivation?!" because he has all of three films slated for this year alone. I’m exhausted just thinking about that amount of effort, so hats off to him. Then again, that kind of aptitude is usually reserved for people who make schlock, porn or both, so maybe this arrangement isn’t as ideal as it sounds. Then again again, having seen this film, I couldn’t be more excited to check out the other two because… wow, this is something else.