Winchester (2018) Movie Review: Too competent for its own good

Some movies are made great by how bad they are. The Room, for example. A bad drama or horror movie can become comedy in a moment, just add a lot of care and a few big wrong turns. Enter Winchester.

    Folks back at the Winchester Repeating Arms company think Sarah Winchester (Mirren), widow of their founder and majority shareholder, is supes cray. See, she moved out west and has been building a house for years and years. There's even rumors she thinks she's capturing ghosts. The company then sends a psychologist (Clarke) with a drug problem to make their case and stop their company from making roller skates.

    Seventeen jump scares. The music ramps up as someone looks a random way seventeen times in this movie. I believe this was done in a vain effort to keep me awake during the first half and stop me laughing during the second.

    This movie is bad. Like, near so-bad-its-good, but not quite. You see, you need a good bit of earnest potential to brave that turn, and the filmmakers here are just a little too competent to get the bad movie job done right.

    Here's my main example: the haunted ginger. This little bastard spends the first boring half of the movie being the only interesting part. He wanders around sleepwalking/possessed with a burlap sack over his head and being pretty creepy. And then when Sarah and the doctor go to fight the evil ghost thing, the screenwriter forgot about the kid. There's obvious shots of not only Mirren mouthing completely opposite words, but the boy and his mother in front of a furnace that has never been set up in the movie. There's no way that was supposed to be what was happening. It felt so forced, as if to say "oh crap, we forgot the kid was in this. Stick him and his mom in a Freddy Krueger basement." The screenwriters/director recognized a problem and over corrected. Had they left the kid out completely, I might not have noticed except to laugh about it later.

    See this movie in a room full of friends who will get super drunk with you and laugh. Do not see this movie alone, as you will fall asleep and be rudely awoken by the loud ass ending.