Mama Said Oculus You Out

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You need to have some rules to your supernatural horror movie. You can't just have everything be all willy nilly - we've got to have a handle at some point on what the powers are that we're dealing with. If you want to toss the rules out later on for a scare I'll give it to you if you've at least established some rules in the first place - it's sort of the difference between Brian DePalma's Carrie, where Carrie's powers make sense, and Kimberley Pierce's remake where Carrie could fly. The ending of Brian DePalma's film makes us jump because it disrupts its own well-established rules... and it gets away with it because it's a dream and wham, we're done. Make it so Carrie can suddenly fly down the street and shit stops mattering - there is no weight to anything. 

So it goes with Oculus, which seems to be rewriting itself as it goes along. Oh logic might be happened upon once in awhile, by accident, and summarily spat out like spoiled milk. Little islands of info-dumps scattered among a sea of liquid baloney. The evil mirror's powers are so far gone that its like we're living inside of Christopher Nolan's Memento - the movie can just step us backwards out of what's actually happening to anyone at any time so far that it's never possible to care about anything, and it becomes a series of things that happen until they aren't happening anymore - affectless semi-abominations, blood-spattered bother.

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