Witchboard (1986)

A primo specimen of pure 1980s badness. It’s just a few rubber masks away from Troll 2-level realms of awfulness. If Ouija boards have ever creeped you out in real life, well, this film will cure that. You’ll never take one seriously again.

Okay, so Tawny Kitaen (under about eighteen-pounds of hair) gets hooked on playing with a Oujia board all day because she thinks she’s talking to a sweet 8 year old boy who died a few years ago, but she’s really talking to an evil murderer. It doesn’t take long before the spirit starts killing people.

Along the way we get a homicide detective who talks in some of the worst hard-boiled dialogue ever written, a pink-haired goth-punk exorcist, a love triangle that seems to exist only to give the actors something to do besides argue about whether or not Ouija boards really work, a terrible slow-motion shot of a guy falling out of a window, 437 major plot holes, and about 2.3 seconds of Tawny Kitaen nude in a shower that’s so full of steam you can barely see her.

Some sources put this film’s budget at two million bucks, but it doesn’t look much better than the nickel-and-dime production values of The Microwave Massacre. I figure half the money either went to a) a really great crafts services table or b) Tawny Kitaen’s hair wrangler.

Followed by a sequel in 1993.