#WINCHESTER HOUSE REVIEWS MOVIE#

What should have been a fun, entertaining jaunt winds up being a maddening, frightful bore. There’s a hog-whimperingly silly performance from Helen Mirren she sports a sub-Queen-Victoria widow outfit and a brow-furrowing, lip-parted expression of grieving concern, wandering in front of the camera and looking round at the furniture with a kind of baffled disapproval, as if to murmur: “What is this place? What am I doing here? A film, you say? My fee was not big enough to justify me having to appear in it.” - The Guardian Total FilmĪ staggeringly pointless supernatural non-chiller featuring some very tiresome jump scares. But from the clunky subtitle (‘The House That Ghosts Built’) to an indifferent script, it’s clear subtlety has fled the building. Surely the whole point of being a ghost is being able to wander where you please? This is a genre where ambiguity is the chief weapon. And the spirits themselves are so disappointingly corporeal that Winchester manages to trap them in their rooms by nailing the doors shut. Jump scares dissipate any mounting unease. The house looks shiny and newly minted, and little is made of its confounding layout. For all their technical competence, the Spierig brothers don’t show great understanding of how ghost stories actually work. There’s a great film to be made out of the Winchester story, but sadly this isn’t it. Now we can only cling to the notion that maybe this will be the biggest let-down of a year that is almost certain to serve up greater examples of that, too. But late last summer, when we got our first peeks at Winchester, we could be excused for getting our hopes up. Back where Dame Helen comes from, they’d call this “weak tea,” and indeed Lionsgate and CBS figured this out probably before they’d released the second trailer to the film, picking Super Bowl weekend to release it, not previewing it for the reviewing press.

#WINCHESTER HOUSE REVIEWS MOVIE#

The first major movie disappointment of 2018. Simply put, Winchester shoots itself in the foot at every opportunity. ABC TucsonĪ horror movie that’s woefully lacking in scares, and definitively dull. 'Winchester' will not be a part of that montage. Someday, when Mirren receives a lifetime achievement award, there will be a montage of her performances in great films. They pepper victims with gunshots - it's never really clear whether the guns are real or are special-issue ghost guns - and are vulnerable to gunshots themselves. You would think that ghosts who blamed a firearms manufacturer for their deaths would be slow to fill out their NRA memberships, but these ghosts pack more heat than a backwoods militia.

Just gawk, scratch your head and dismiss it with a 'Whatever. Maybe it's best appreciated in the manner of the landmark curiosity on which it's based, the Winchester Mystery House. You never quite know whether to laugh, scream or cry at the weirdness that Winchester slaps on screen. everything here is dull, derivative and arbitrary to the point of grating absurdity. Mirren’s sternest test as an actress is to getting to the end of this without actually laughing. Mirren just looks like she hates being here. It needed a bit more Bette Davis, a bit of sarcasm. Nor does she give it the whole Miss Havisham scary-spinster camp.

She may have been the Queen, but she’s no scream queen.

Mirren does her best to bring some gravitas to the role, although I’m not sure that’s what it needed. Not even Helen Mirren's glares can save this screamingly bad poltergeist pile-up. Read on for the Most Brutal Reviews Of Winchester. Rest assured that it’s more than earned its 8% score. Winchester Mystery House may be one of the most famous haunted houses on the planet, but the only scary thing about Winchester is its Rotten Tomatoes score. Related: Winchester Review - Helen Mirren’s Haunted House is Kinda Boring Despite a screen-worthy, real life tale from which to draw from, a talented cast (highlighted by Mirren and co-star Jason Clarke), and a handful of promising teasers, Winchester falls well short of expectations.

Winchester house reviews