‘Witchboard’ (R)

There's much more suspense on "Wheel of Fortune" than in "Witchboard," a thrill-an-hour distraction that promises much more than it delivers. It's not as if the idea of a misbehaving Ouija board doesn't hold some potential on the spook-and-spell front, but first time writer-director Kevin S. Tenney, a recent grad of the UCLA film school, hasn't the faintest idea of how to write a story or direct a film. With soporific acting, clumsy exposition that is mostly dull talk and inaction, a dearth of special effects and a wooden framework, this should have been called "Witchbored."

Halfway through the film, one of the characters mutters (and not just once, but three times), "I've got a real bad feeling about this," by which time most savvy spectators will have had the same. At a college party, live-in lovers Todd Allen and Tawny Kitaen run into Stephen ("Days of Our Lives") Nichols, who was their former best friend and boyfriend (sequentially and respectively, of course). Nichols brings as his date an old Ouija board and shows off by dialing up the spirit of a 10-year-old boy killed 30 years before. But Somebody Else, Something Evil -- his name is Malfeitor -- butts into the conversation.

Must have been a party line.

Having thus conjured the spirit, Tenney fails to call upon him in any convincing fashion for the rest of the film except as an excuse for "point-of-view" camera work: On those rare occasions when Malfeitor actually does something, cinematographer Roy Wagner resorts to a swooping, wide-angle lens vocabulary that has become a cliche' in the horror genre. Unfortunately, Malfeitor never really appears, opting to do his talking through the Ouija board -- and the suspense is D-E-A-D-L-Y.

Apparently Tenney couldn't afford special effects beyond a fog machine. His notion of spookiness is doors slamming shut and the board's planchette circling the alphabet. He gets no help from his blow-dry cast, and Kitaen's alleged "possession" is nine-tenths of the flaw in "Witchboard." A recent graduate of the Pia Zadora School of Acting, Kitaen is a serious thespian compared with Nichols and Allen, who are upstaged at every turn by a wooden Ouija board that might have a hard time spelling "cat" even if you spotted it the "c" and the "t." Then again, the planchette has a lot more movement than the film itself.

This is not a good sign.

Kathleen Wilhoite appears briefly as Zaboreth, a sort of Valley Girl medium called in to spook the spirit and inject a little "psychic humor" into "Witchboard." Had Tenney or executive producer Walter Josten asked either Zaboreth or the Ouija board whether this film was worth making, the answer would have been "N-O."

"Witchboard" contains violence, profanity and a brief nude scene.