Winchester

It is better than most "Paranormal Activity" sequels in regards that the make-up effects are very well done. The biggest flaw with the movie is the dialogue. The dialogue, for a lack of a better word, is just plain corny. I struggle to enjoy a movie with horrible dialogue, but if you can get past that flaw you should enjoy this movie very much.

There are multiple jumpscares throughout the movie which did cause audience member to jump and gasp. The scenery of the movie is my favorite part, as the scenery is what made me feel uneasy with fear. The lighting of the scenes are perfect and the re-creation of the supposedly horrifying house are gripping. If you are easily scared you should have a blast with this movie! For horror fans that are looking for some exceptional horror, this movie is not for you.

While it is clear that The Spierig Brothers are familiar with all the haunted house horror story conventions, they, like Rob Zombie before them, do not seem to be able to effectively use them. A fondness for the genre does not translate into the ability to engage and frighten an audience.

Before anyone dismisses my review as being from someone who doesn't enjoy deliberately paced, creepy stories without a plethora of pyrotechnics, let me state that The Haunting (the original not the crappy remake) and 1944's The Uninvited are two of my favorite films. You don't need a large budget or special effects to make a scary film on the subject of a haunted house. Both Insidious and Sinister demonstrated that with good direction and a decent story you can scare the hell out of an audience.

While Winchester boasts some good actors and a wonderful setting that is fraught with possibilities, it squanders both on a tired story of ghosts looking for revenge, which completely ignores the real facts of the Winchester House. A couple jump scares accompanied by sudden music stings work to a degree, but there is no genuine feeling of suspense generated by the script, no growing sense of escalating dread. Instead we get acceptable performances and some nice looking sets as the actors go through their paces to little effect.

It's not a terrible film, but one which fails to raise the hackles and which you will quickly forget after leaving the theater.

There's a decent story here about an alcoholic living in the Winchester house who can't tell if he's experiencing withdrawals or something supernatural. Jason Clarke plays Dr. Price, who is invited to live in the Winchester house to give Ms. Winchester an ongoing psychological evaluation. Thing is, he's an alcoholic and Ms. Winchester won't allow him to be intoxicated as long as he's living in her house. So when he starts seeing apparitions, are they hallucinations? Are they ghosts? Dr. Price doesn't know and neither do we. Great setup.

But the movie chooses to go the boring route instead. It sidelines the interesting character study for a contrived ghost plot filled with every horror cliché in the book. What would a horror movie be without predictable, lame jump scares. There's not a single decent scare in the entire movie.

Winchester was a frustrating watch. The potential is right there, but it clutches onto these tired horror tropes for dear life - as if a mainstream audience wouldn't appreciate a deeper, more psychological approach to the material over a haphazardly-constructed, derivative, haunted house flick. It's the studio mentality - make it for a million bucks, we make 20 times that. They don't care about the integrity of the script or the material itself, and neither should you. By the way, this is a true story where 98% of the story is made up. Contradiction? No, marketing.

Again, Winchester is not terrible so much as it is frustrating. And boring. Don't bother with this one.

While I did like a little bit of the film, the story of Ms. Winchester was just so inaccurate. (Skip to paragraph 2 if you don't care about accuracy) I live less than 20 miles from the Winchester house and have been there multiple times and know the story. First of all, she wasn't building the house to protect herself from attacking spirits, she was building it out of guilt to help the spirits she supposedly communicated with, and while the film briefly touches on that, the majority is her building the house to protect from evil spirits, which is untrue, it was guilt and she was building it to serve as a home to spirits . She also wasn't an ominous and foreboding old woman who always wore black in a haunted house, by all accounts she was a normal and social woman who held many community events and parties at her house. But besides that the film was hit an miss, some good scares and atmosphere, and some not so good.

Helen Mirren did an alright job with her role and the rest of the actors were also very average. The atmosphere was well done, but good direction is not needed because the house itself is beautiful and mysterious. The scares are hit and miss, out of about 12, only 2 got me, but I'm a horror veteran, a group of teenage girls however screamed multiple times. Some scares work because of the accented atmosphere, but some are pretty lame and predictable, making the film an average chiller with noting very special. Over all the film is just another average effort for a Hollywood horror film that does not shine like other better films.

I would not recommend this to horror veterans.

I don't wanna sound to negative I mean the movie wasn't good but it had interesting idea that the souls of dead people killed by the Winchester guns are haunting Sarah Winchester house as she build rooms that represents the rooms they died on it and she try to apologize and make them leave and so on and so on.

Well that's indeed interesting idea but it's done very poorly so predictable in so many ways, I wish there were like a twist or something even stealing "The sixth sense" twist it doesn't matter make something interesting happen.

The acting was so ordinary nothing special from anyone I expected Sarah Snook will have a major role in the movie cause I loved so much in "Predestination" but it didn't appear as much and it was okay..The Winchester house the main focus of the movie looked very good from the inside made the movie looked great but the outside shots of the house looked like cheap CGI from an old game and the monster in the movie I think they didn't troubled themselves with adding makeup to make the monsters believable they just made it all CGI and just make the shot very dark no one will know..And the movie really so much in cheap jump scares if you took them out of the movie we can say it's comedy not horror and that's in my opinion is like the thing was most of the horror movies of the last decade they lack creativity despite the horror genre is one of the genres that you can invent no ways to scare people and it will work..STOP USING CHEAP JUMP SCARES!