2018 horror movie
Rating: 8/20
Plot: A psychologist is sent to the architectural wondrous Winchester house to declare the rifle heiress insane so that her control over the company can be taken over. She believes the house is inhabited by the spirits of people killed by the company's product.
Seeing the preview for this a half dozen times, I was convinced that it might be interesting, especially since it is based on a true story and Helen Mirren was involved. If I had seen that poster up there, I would have reconsidered. I was the only person in the theater when I saw this, and I spent most of the movie pacing back and forth in anger. If others had been there, I still might have paced, and if they asked me what the hell I was doing, I would have yelled, "What?! These horror movie cliches aren't bothering you?!"
Countless jump scares with half-second cacophony, characters acting inexplicably just to have an excuse for those jump scares to exist in the first place, obvious character arcs, a little kid singing "Beautiful Dreamer," gross zombie ghost figures that could have come from any other movie with gross zombie ghosts. This was ugly stuff. This was stuffed with so many horror cliches that I was half-convinced it was a parody of some kind.
At the end, they flashed up some info about the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 causing a lot of damage. What the hell was that? Was that the filmmakers way of saying, "Hey, guys, I'm just kidding about all this ghost stuff. Everybody in the movie was obviously nuts because they thought an earthquake was a ghost."
The most enjoyment I got from this movie is looking up the song "Beautiful Dreamer" on my phone, something else that you can do when you're the only person in the theater, hoping for an anachronism error. I was ready to make fun of the movie for suggesting that the creepy red-headed kid had written "Beautiful Dreamer." Turns out that the song is from 1864, the last song that Stephen Foster wrote. So that's interesting.
Something I learned: Winchester also made roller skates. I kind of want to make my own movie about a house haunted by the ghosts of people who have been killed by roller skates. It would obviously be a musical.
This movie is in theaters? I saw a couple of previews for it in the theater, but I have not seen a single ad for it on television. Damn, I had a little hope for this film that it would be more about the crazy Winchester woman, and the house not really being haunted. Oh well, I get the feeling I would have the exact same reaction as you to this movie. Now I can skip it safely, even though I didnt even know it was out yet. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteThe preview definitely threw me off. I thought it looked pretty good, maybe because the house looked cool and Mirren was in it. By the time I actually went to the theater, I knew it was going to be bad because I'd seen it's Rotten Tomatoes score.
ReplyDeleteThis was bad, but the last movie I saw in the theater managed to be even worse!