Skip to main content

An Inferior Haunting


The Winchester Mystery House of San Jose is one of the most famous haunted mansions in North America. Built by the daughter-in-law of the man who invented the Winchester rifle, many claimed it was haunted by the ghosts of the people killed by those weapons. Looming and vast, it’s been a progenitor or inspiration behind countless haunted house stories including Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House and even Disney’s Haunted Mansion.
Seems like the perfect subject matter to give to the directors of Jigsaw doesn’t it?
In 1906, Doctor Eric Price (Jason Clarke) is sent to San Jose to diagnose the eccentric heiress Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren) and determine if she is mentally well after a series of bizarre behaviours. When he arrives at the mansion she’s rebuilding, she reveals her communication with spirits as these same ghosts in the house begin to haunt him as well.
Winchester is an extremely formulaic horror movie. The plot is absolutely banal and really cheesy the further in it gets; the characters are paper thin and the dialogue insipid. The idea of ghosts haunting a family who just happened to invent the specific firearm that killed them is already a little lame, and the movie’s additional plotting doesn’t help this any, because it falls back on too many tropes. For example, there’s a kid in this movie, which of course means he has to spend whole scenes possessed by a spirit, and all the times he’s not he can never act like a regular kid. The reveal of this possession early on also shows the movie’s utter lack of imagination, as the boy is seen walking around with a bag on his head and when the mother removes it there’s nothing at all odd about him except that his irises are white. This movie has no sense of mood it’s not stealing from a hundred other horror movies that do it better. Worst of all, there are no good scares and only lazily constructed suspense; it relies far too much on fake-outs and cheap jump scares -and the jump scares are so quick you don’t even register what they are over the obnoxious musical cue and swift lighting adjustment that accompanies every single one.
The one thing that’s really salvaged in this movie is Helen Mirren’s performance. But Helen Mirren is Helen Mirren and she’d have to try to give a bad performance. She spends the entire film in a black gown and veil of mourning as a symbol of the grief over her lost husband and son, as though she were a subverted Miss Havisham -which wasn’t true of the real Sarah Winchester. Her character can often be annoying and irrational, which is the point, but it nonetheless makes her very hard to invest in. Jason Clarke gives a decent performance, but he doesn’t quite have the talent to pull through this lesser material. The writers try to give his character a backstory relating to the main plot about the guilt he has over the death of his wife, but it’s never substantive enough for you to care. He mostly exists to be the typical sceptic object of jump scares as he wanders the place at night for no real reason. None of the other actors leave any imprint and for the most part aren’t very good.
All of these are par for the course for bad horror movies, but what irritates me is that this is a haunted house story, and one with a lot of potential. Given the legacy of the Winchester there’s a lot that could be done, and it deserved way more effort put in. Because that’s the biggest crime of this movie: there’s no effort. This could have been something as compellingly spooky as The Haunting (based on the aforementioned Jackson novel), incorporating psychological neuroses in its characters and claustrophobic cinematography in its presentation to make for a truly unnerving film. It should at least have been Crimson Peak. But it never attempts to make the Winchester itself scary, just the supernatural figures it places in it, and that’s not enough. Not everyone believes ghosts are real, but the Winchester House certainly is.
Parts of this movie were actually filmed at the Winchester House, which at least makes me more curious to see it. It’s bound to be more interesting than this movie, which is ultimately just another glaringly dull, instantly forgettable horror flick, recycling clichés and resorting to the same old shoddy plot devices. Like The Conjuring, Winchester opens with an assertion it’s inspired by true events, but I for one refuse to believe reality is that contrived.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Strange History of the American Spoof Movie

Parody movies have been around for a lot longer than we tend to think of them. Even from the earliest days of Hollywood there were movies meant to satirize a particular subject or genre. In the silent era, Buster Keaton was responsible for a few. And in the early sound era, almost as soon as the monster pictures took off did you see comic versions of them -Abbott and Costello hosting a few. But parody movies tended to be subtle for most of cinema history, or parody came in conjunction with another goal of the comedy. It really wasn’t until the 1980s and 90s that it took off and became popularly understood. And there is perhaps a line to be drawn to the counterculture comedy explosion that began in the 1970s through avenues like  Saturday Night Live , which frequently parodied from even its earliest years popular movies and cultural properties of the time. But that is still a way’s back. To my generation though, ‘parody movie’ is perhaps a less known term than the more blunt ‘s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Notes on the Title Cards of The Lord of the Rings

It might be sacrilege for one who both considers The Lord of the Rings  trilogy to be one of the greatest triumphs of cinema and has been an avid lover of the films since adolescence, to declare that the original theatrical cuts of the films are better than the much beloved extended editions. Easily it’s my most controversial opinion regarding these movies. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the extended editions quite a lot, especially as someone who just enjoys spending time in that universe. They flesh it out more, add extra flavour, and in increasing the length by about an hour really emphasize the epic quality of these films. But I find that the original cuts are generally more cleanly paced, more seamlessly edited, and much more accessible to audiences. All the stuff there is to love about The Lord of the Rings  is there in the original versions, the plethora of new and extended scenes merely add to that for fans. And of those, they fall into three camps for me: 1....
1 comment
Read more

Back to the Feature: New York, New York (1977)

New York, New York  is a two hour forty minute musical movie largely about a toxic relationship and I understand why it was Martin Scorsese’s first big flop. Some have blamed its poor reception on the kind of movie it was, of a style and tone Scorsese wasn’t known for, but I find that hard to believe. Even after only five films, he’d proven himself an extremely versatile director, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore  found an audience. Sure this jazz musical love letter to New York City was following up Taxi Driver and its’ far more cynical take on the city, but then it’s also ‘from the director of Taxi Driver ’ which itself was a big hit. Was it a matter of public appetite for musicals, or mere word of mouth and early critical reception that dissuaded viewers? Irrespective of that, I was stunned to discover this movie was the origin of the titular song, which I’d assumed was much older (it’s definitely got the sound of something that might have come out of the Jazz sce...
Post a Comment
Read more