Like pretty much every internet “challenge” the whole “Charlie, Charlie” thing had a super brief period of popularity, some news coverage, and then faded into memory. Someone out there decided that this fart in the wind of a YouTube fad was the new Ouija board of spooky bullshit and decided to make a movie about it. Or, rather, decided to make a horror movie where technically the game is involved but it’s mostly just people wandering around waiting to be murdered.

The plot, such as it is, revolves around a failing haunted house attraction that needs to drum up customers. The owner hears about some murders that happened involving the Charlie, Charlie game and so he decides that inviting some people over to play Charlie, Charlie will somehow get people interested in coming. The people play the game for about 5 seconds and then fuck off to wander the haunted house while the spirit of Charlie kills a bunch of people in off screen ways. The lone survivor of the original incident shows up to help and eventually they stop the game. Hooray.

Everything about this movie is cheap and shitty. The ghost/demon that is Charlie is just a bad CGI blue wisp that floats around and chases after people. They couldn’t even be bothered to put a kid in creepy makeup and have him murder folks. The acting is truly awful and it isn’t helped any by the way that the audio is never level and the editing makes it so that conversation doesn’t flow well. The directing and camera work in here are student film quality at best as the movie itself doesn’t seem to know if it wants to be serious or a joke but there are no scares or tension and none of the jokes actually land. One of the employees dresses up like a racist Mexican stereotype because Charlie is supposed to be a Mexican ghost. Oh, how ribauld. This movie is like a wet cat barf on the pillow of cinema.

I can almost forgive shitty acting, effects, and sound quality in a no budget indie horror film since, hey, everyone needs to start somewhere. What I actually hate is when the script calls for things that make no sense or are actively useless. The first deaths in the movie are the employees of the haunted house that were going to scare the people playing the game which is dumb since the whole point of Charlie, Charlie is it’s only supposed to “get” you if you start playing and don’t finish and none of the employees were playing. There’s also multiple points where we cut to a middle aged couple that park a car outside the haunted house and argue about whether they will have sex and I think we find out they are cheating on their spouses? Anyway, at some point they leave and never interact with the rest of the movie at all.

For some reason the people behind the Ouija series decided to buy this film and slap a number 3 on it but I can’t imagine anyone purposefully wanting to be associated with this movie.  0.5 out of 5