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Rating: 0.5 out of 5
I am not going to sit here and say I know a lot about guns. I have minimal knowledge. I know that the Winchester rifle was a beast of a weapon back in the day. The Model 1873 introduced the first Winchester center fire cartridge, the .44-40 WCF (Winchester Center Fire). These rifle families are commonly known as the “Gun That Won the West.” That is about all I know about rifles.
Now I also have no idea what I was stepping into with this movie. I never knew that Sarah Winchester built a massive mansion that you can actually tour. After a quick Wikipedia search, the estate has 61 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms (one completed and one unfinished), 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, and 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basement levels, and three elevators. That is absolutely crazy. Then they made a terrible film about it.
The film is inspired by true events, which is quite crazy. Sarah Winchester (Mirren) is the widow of famed gun manufacturer William Wirt Winchester. Sarah is in charge of all her late husband’s business but also seems strange as she keeps adding rooms upon rooms to her already massive estate. Her husband’s sudden death, along with her daughter Annie’s death, has left her isolated from the world with her only eyes on the project she is doing. With the inheritance of the sudden wealth that she has obtained, Sarah is convinced that she is cursed by the ghosts of everyone who has died at the hands of Winchester firearms. Troubled by her thoughts, she seeks advice from a medium and begins her mansions renovation project ins San Jose, California. Constructed in an incessant twenty-four hour a day, seven days a week mania for decades, it stands seven stories tall and contains hundreds of rooms. Sarah tells the world that she is not building for herself or her niece Marion (Snook) or anyone at the company. She is building a prison, an asylum for hundreds of vengeful ghosts. Investors fearing that Sarah’s unstable mind will cause a backlash against the company wants to take over control. They hire Dr. Eric Price (Clarke) to evaluate her mental stability. As Dr. Price does his observation, he soon learns that many things Sarah is stating is true and must find a way to help the widow from becoming like the victims of her family fortune.
I love me some Helen Mirren, but Winchester is one of the most boring horror movies I have seen in a while. I honestly do not have anything good to say about this film because it is a standard horror movie with few scares and a shallow storyline. You can honestly point out many similarities between several horror movies where the main character, who has many personal issues, goes into a haunted house and then becomes a believer while resolving any issue they have
Where the story tries its best is having two stories in one or, shall I say, a reason for one person to help another. Dr. Price’s character is so predictable that anyone who has ever seen a horror movie knows what will happen. The dude is haunted by the past and misses his dead wife. I know you heard that before. He spends most of his time taking drugs to escape the pain of the past. We also cannot forget that dude was close to death from a Winchester rifle bullet. The movie spends more time than it should on this character.
The movie should have spent a variety of time on Sarah Winchester and her drive to build this massive house for all these damn ghosts. It could have been something like 13 Ghosts but on a far grander level. The film gives a little background information on why she is doing it, but it could have really gone deep and picked fifteen ghosts to focus on. We get the same story, an old lady who everyone thinks is going crazy, and people want to take her company away from her. If they made the story about her family and how she started to see the ghosts and how she captures them, this film would have been ten times better.
What the film gives us is a story about a ghost that is beyond pissed off. We get a Confederate Civil War soldier ghost who has a significant grudge against Sarah and wants that revenge believing the Winchester rifle was why the South lost the war. The story puts the spirit in plain sight as a butler who no one can see but the highly messed up doctor.
As for the scares, there are very, very few that might make your skin tense up but overall, pretty laughable. Dude goes into a small cabinet area, and you should expect he will see someone jump out of the darkness. We also get a kid who seems to be always possessed and on the brink of killing themselves by walking off the roof or pointing a gun. Whatever the reason, the little boy or girl always becomes possessed and ends up being the one link that makes everyone realize that maybe a kid shouldn’t be around.
As for the performances, Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester was “What the F**k was this!” Mirren is an all-time great and an Academy Award winner, and I don’t know what she was doing in this role. It pains me to say that she was awful in this role. She was utterly lifeless for all of the movie. I don’t know what to say because the disappointment is high. I would talk about the supporting cast and even the protagonist, but it is a complete WASTE OF TIME! No need to write about something that would be mind-numbing and really doesn’t affect the story. In simpler terms, the supporting cast was BLAH.
Winchester is a film that has a great idea and history behind it but ultimately fails in making it a horror film. It could be on the level of Jason X. Now that was also an awful movie. You have a better time watching The Haunting of Hill House because that is by far more entertaining than this film.
