Winchester

Winchester (2018)

Dir. The Spierig Brothers

Written by Tom Vaughan, The Spierig Brothers

Starring, what the absolute fuck, Dame Helen Mirren, Jason Clarke, Sarah Snook, Eamon Farren

Yes, yes, I know everyone in the world said this was absolute garbage. But come on, look at the ingredients here! First and foremost, of course, we get the tantalizing prospect of Academy-award winner and grand duchess of acting Helen Mirren slumming it up in some dumbass haunted house thriller. I know, I know, it’s not like she exactly has an untrammeled record of high class prestige films. She has NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS, THE NUTCRACKER AND THE FOUR REALMS, and three separate –and counting!—FAST AND FURIOUS movies on her resume, along with THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE and THE QUEEN and GOSFORD PARK and all that. Hell, she’s in a 2005 DTV Cuba Gooding Jr. crime thriller. But still, of all the Oscar winners I’ve encountered shamelessly slumming in lowbrow horror fare for a quick paycheck –and there have been a lot this year, including Jack Palance, Martin Landau (twice!), Jose Ferrer, Dorothy Malone, and Joan Crawford—Mirren still seems like the most unlikely, and certainly the one least in need of this kind of garbage. Horror gets them all eventually; either before their star has risen (a young DiCaprio in CRITTERS 3) or as their career starts to flag (Ray Milland in THE PYJAMA [sic] GIRL CASE), but seldom indeed does horror come calling in the middle of what is, to all appearances, a career as vital and productive as it has ever been. It’s a truly befuddling decision, but obviously I’m all for it (just as I was for Octavia Spencer’s recent horror pivot in MA), even if I can’t claim to understand it. It feels like we won, somehow. We got her!

And then, as if that wasn’t enough, you’ve also got Jason Clarke (LAWLESS), Eamon Farren (Twin Peaks: The Return) and Sarah Snook (JESSABELLE, Succession), the latter of whom we last encountered absolutely slaying it in PREDESTINATION, a film directed by these very same Spierig Brothers who serve as directors here! The same Spierig Brothers, in fact, who were kinda on a roll for a little while, with 2003’s UNDEAD, 2009’s DAYBREAKERS, and 2014’s PREDESTINATION all turning out to be remarkably delightful genre fare (I’m not really a SAW guy but it seems like people mostly agreed their 2017 JIGSAW was OK, not great). So that’s a winning team already assembled, and on top of that, you can add a splendid premise: it’s a film about the famous Winchester Mystery House, a topic which has always intrigued me and seems like it should all be itself be unique and colorful enough to fuel a solid gothic horror flick. Oh, and I even like the poster, which has an appreciably stark, evocative M.C. Escher look (see above). This movie really seems to have everything going for it, I mean, how could it not be grea… oh crap.

To the surprise of no one, I can now add my own voice to an essentially unanimous consensus that there is definitely a way for this to not be great, and that way is the one you can see on-screen. There is initially reason for hope, though; the location footage of the house itself is quite lovely (the film was shot by Spierig regular Ben Nott, who also deserves a mention for shooting 24 HOURS TO LIVE) and makes it seems like it’s at least going to be a classy Victorian affair with an interesting setting (in both the house itself and sunny, tropical California/Melbourne locale, an unusually bright and lush milieu for a horror movie even under perpetually troubled gray skies). Stately Victorian-Gothic haunted house flicks are not exactly a surefire guarantee of white-knuckled terror (let alone entertainment), but at least we don’t get very many of them, and this one seems to have a can’t-miss premise.

…which is then almost immediately missed, first with some eye-rolling clichés (Jason Clarke is –and you won’t believe this!—a guy haunted by grief following the death of a loved one!) which quickly give way to a stultifying death march of agonizingly rote jump-scares, and not even that many of them.* Amazingly, even that wasn’t enough to immediately tamp down my at-this-point wholly inexplicable optimism. That’s partially because the first jump-scare, at least, is the final flourish of a rather nicely staged little sequence of coquettish misdirection, and it gave me false hope about the level of effort that was going to go into them. But if I found myself in a remarkably lenient mood towards this kind of chicanery, it’s also because I swear to god, I discovered that in this age of gloomy, dour A24 “post-horror” mopefests, encountering a corny old boo! jump-scare was like running into an old friend. Aww, buddy, how long’s it been? It feels like I haven’t seen you in ages!

Unfortunately, after a warm reunion, it quickly became clear that this was more like running into an old friend you haven’t seen in ages, and then, after 5 minutes of talking to them, remembering that the reason why you haven’t seen them in ages is because they’re intolerably annoying. Right, there was a reason this kind of hacky business was wisely and correctly cast out of society. It’s unendurable. But the five minutes of fond nostalgia was fun while it lasted.

There’s not too much to say about the plot, which is, like the setting, both inscrutably complicated and functionally useless. Let’s just say that it feels self-consciously compelled to introduce far too many characters and plot twists and backstory for a narrative which basically boils down to “there is a haunted house and Helen Mirren is there.” There is one pretty charming twist involving the identity of the villain, exactly the kind of empty-headed but gleeful silliness which could have made for a fun romp. But unfortunately the script mostly takes itself exceedingly seriously. Much more so than I would have imagined possible for something which features a haunted roller skate. In fact, it generally seems to unwisely, --disastrously, in fact-- believe itself to be yet another weepy, dismal metaphor for dealing with grief, which is a dire mode for the Spierig Brothers, who are at their best with zippy, high-concept entertainment and have –to their credit, I suppose—no patience whatsoever for lugubrious atmospherics. They seem openly bored with the grinding slow build, whooshing around the camera impatiently and itching to get to the next setpiece. Except, with this lame script (which they co-wrote it, so they’re not entirely off the hook**) there is no next setpiece. All you have to look forward to is the next jump scare with a loud musical sting. It’s a bad fit between filmmakers and material (not that Kubrick himself would be able to squeeze much atmospheric dread from this limp, dusty ol’ lemon of a screenplay), though I guess given the two bad options available to them, going for hoary whammy instead of mannered gloom was the more honorable decision. And it does kind of pay off in the ending, which takes a direction so amazingly boneheaded it tilts towards active parody, and might actually get there if it wasn’t also so boring. Not that their commitment to frothy entertainment pans out at all, but at least it’s sprightlier than it would be if it was a Blumhouse or A24 production. That’s something

I should also, I guess, mention that the movie really seems to think it’s about guns or something – the Winchester of the title is, of course, the abode of Sarah Winchester, widow of William Wirt Winchester, heir to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and her hauntings are said to be the result of all the death brought on by those repeating arms. She goes on and on about this in a perfectly workable American accent. “You - feel responsible for the misuse of your product?” Asks Clarke. “If a weapon works as intended, one can hardly call it a misuse,” she responds, frostily. When complimented on her “superior” rifles, she retorts that they’re superior at “Killing. Indiscriminate killing. Very superior.” It’s not exactly subtle. So you figure, sure, mean ol’ liberal Hollywood hates the Constitution and wants to take your guns, fine, whatever. But here’s the weird thing. SPOILERS SPOILERS at the end, you know how they defeat the evil ghost? Fuckin’ shoot him with a magic gun! Firearms: The cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. I can’t tell if this is, like, deliberate subversion of Winchester’s anti-gun policy, or if this script was just written by lazy idiots who didn’t realize they completely negate their point. I guess it doesn’t matter though because guess what, we’re not getting rid of the guns, it just ain’t gonna happen. If Helen Mirren being haunted is the price we have to pay to keep guns to protect ourselves from asshole ghosts, Americans are willing to pay that price. END SPOILERS

Anyway, with a paper-thin story, you’re really gonna need the actors to carry a movie, and maybe that’s what the Spierigs were counting on, because they definitely got some ringers. But alas, here we learn once again that professional acting is simply not something which greatly benefits an otherwise threadbare genre movie. Mirren is perfectly adequate in a very dumb and exposition-heavy role, but honestly not doing anything appreciably different than any normal professional old lady actor could give you. And it wouldn’t really matter if she was; this role could be played by Tara Reid in an Andy Warhol wig and it would amount to about the same thing. In fact, it would almost certainly be better just by virtue of being something. Clarke, who is capable of being exceedingly good but just as often seems to vanish into the background, at least brings a sort of weird detached annoyance to his role, which is something, although maybe just what he was feeling at having to read these dumbass lines. Sarah Snook, so terrific in PREDESTINATION, is criminally wasted on a useless nothing of a character, though I guess you could argue the Spierigs just wanted to throw some work her way. Fair enough, the poor lady’s gotta eat while she waits for Hollywood to set her loose on something worthy of her talents.

Anyway, the whole thing is kinda a waste, in fact it’s almost amazing how completely it fails to make anything of the bounty of potential it assembles. It just goes to show you, you can get together the right ingredients, but you still have to BOO!!

Ha, got you. See, that shit’s still fun. Once.

* “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." "Yeah, I know; and such small portions!”

** Although I have a suspicion they re-wrote it from a previous script by Tom Vaughn (Wesley Snipe’s UNSTOPPABLE), and basically just added the four or five fun parts.

               

 

Haha, wow. Surely whatever they paid her wasn't worth being implicated this graphic design nightmare.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2019 CHECKLIST!

For Richer or Horror

TAGLINE	Inspired By True Events At The Most Haunted House In History. Also, the much better Terror Is Building
TITLE ACCURACY	There are both a house and a character by that name.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA/ Australia
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Haunted House, Period Horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Man, I still can’t believe I have to type the words “Helen Mirren” in here.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Spierig Brothers? Not an icon, I guess, but I will always think fondly of them for DAYBREAKERS and PREDISTINATION
NUDITY?	There might be, like, a boob early on? I think Jason Clarke is in a bordello type opium house at one point. I dunno. It’s PG-13, anyway.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yup
POSSESSION?	You betcha
CREEPY DOLLS?	I wanna say no? But if so it’s the only haunted house cliché they left out.
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Yes, except it’s one of those madnesses where it turns out it was actually ghosts
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	You can assemble all the right ingredients, but you still need an actual movie.

Jess Franco’s Jack The Ripper

Jess Franco’s Jack The Ripper (1976)

Dir. and written by Jesus Franco

Starring Klaus Kinski, Josephine Chaplin, Herbert Fux

Well here’s something with a pedigree that promises a perfect storm for amateurish sleaze. You’ve got A) ultra-prolific Spanish pornogratuer Jesus "Jess" Franco (JESS FRANCO’S DRACULA, THE AWFUL DR. ORLOFF) B) legendarily eccentric weirdo actor Klaus Kinski (CRAWLSPACE, MY BEST FIEND), C) a Jack the Ripper adaptation (a subgenre which has produced such jewels of taste and restraint as ASSAULT! JACK THE RIPPER and THE NEW YORK RIPPER*) and D) the year 1976, smack dab in the very black heart of exploitation grindhouse fever. Combine those ingredients in a blurry ripped-from-vhs rights-questionable youtube version and bake at four or five pints and you should have reached peak euro-sleaze at about 90 minutes.    

Given all that, no one is more surprised than I to have to inform you that this movie is mostly pretty normal. I never thought I’d say this about a Jesus Franco Ripper movie, but the whole thing is competently assembled, and, if anything, a little dry. Dry, for fuck’s sake! It’s not entirely without some sleaze and gore (there’s a pretty graphic dissection scene and an unpleasant bit where Jack rapes his victim as he’s stabbing her to death. Probably wouldn’t have that in the Merchant-Ivory version), but man, there’s a lot of polite British people having conversations in well-lit sitting rooms. It’s more stuffy period drama than venal exploitation fare. Hell, Hitchcock’s FRENZY from four years earlier is way more lurid.

Partially that might be because the film inexplicably has nothing whatsoever to do with the real Jack the Ripper case, which IIRC was not solved by a blind man who assures the police that he knows a murder took place because “My senses are twice as acute as most men, and I have a sixth sense: I recognize the screams of a dying woman.” Pretty good superpower there.

This same helpful blind man will ultimately identify the killer by odor, but not before he’s told the police that “The murderer, I feel, cannot control his compulsion to kill. I was able to sense that he was almost as terrified as his victim… he was consumed with strong emotion... Yes, insane, but a sort of madness which… could be transformed into brilliance… he seemed as one possessed, not a sadistic killer... He’s slight, strong, rigorous, but not a manual laborer, certainly an intellectual… His scent, it was… a strange odor I can remember exactly now. A rare blend of old books and fresh fragrance. The murderer smelled of several familiar odors, expensive soaps, sweat, and very fine woolen clothes and mild turkish tobacco, and also…alcohol… what I detected was medicinal alcohol and then a real surprise… a rare medicinal plant of India…. In England, it’s found only in a botanical garden, it is called akmar.”

“You’ve told me very little,” grouses the officer taking his statement, perhaps used to blind witnesses immediately solving the case and arresting the culprit themselves without involving the police.     

This is an absolutely phororealistic police sketch of a cartoon vampire.

This blind guy is clearly the hero of the movie, but it will come as no surprise to you to learn that Kinski is the villain, one Dr. Dennis Orloff (a name which seems to be a mainstay of Franco’s productions for reason I’d be genuinely afraid to ask). Orloff is, indeed, “one possessed, not a sadistic killer.” And he’s also “slight, strong, rigorous, but not a manual laborer, certainly an intellectual.” Since smell-o-vision has not been invented as of this writing, I cannot comment on the rest of the description. But Orloff is definitely a rather tormented man, by day working as a penniless doctor to the city’s very poor, but by night tormented with kaleidoscopic visions of his mother in a 19th-century S&M getup taunting him with sexually suggestive provocations. Although I am not a trained medical practitioner, I would have to guess that’s not a sign of particularly robust mental health.

That sounds like the perfect eccentric weirdo role for Kinski, but unfortunately he’s being dubbed by some British guy here, diminishing his weirdo readings and flattening out his performance somewhat. I can’t tell if he’s deliberately holding back or just phoning it in, but he’s hardly “electrifying” as they say on the DVD back cover. Still interesting to watch (he’s incapable of being anything else; even David Schmoeller had to concede that much), but not going mega here seems like a missed opportunity, since psychological realism is absolutely out of the question. His motivation (saw his mom having sex with a sailor, pretty much) is about as standard-issue as they come in 70’s slasher movies, and, conversely, is also not a real thing, so playing it low-key was probably not the right choice. Well, anyway, low-key if you don’t count the crazy psychedelic dream sequence:

The movie could have used more of that kind of nuttiness.

As it is, it has a handful of desultorily prurient murders but at least two large handful of drama. There’s Orloff’s ladylady (Olga Gebhard, SHE DEVILS OF THE SS) who would really like to marry the handsome young doctor; there’s a half-witted fisherman (Herbert Fux, LADY FRANKENSTEIN) who suspects he’s the killer, there are a series of nude victims (among them Franco muse Lina Romay, BARBED WIRE DOLLS, FEMALE VAMPIRE), and a police inspector (Andreas Mannkopff, dozens of German-language movies every year, none of which you’ve ever heard of) and his ballerina girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin --daughter of Charlie-- Pasolini’s THE CANTURBURY TALES) who I did not realize were actually the main characters until very nearly the last 15 minutes. And that blind guy turns up a few more times, too.  

The most interesting thing in the whole movie is that “Jack” (aka Dennis Orloff?) has an accomplice in a botanical gardener, who knows about the murders and inexplicably aids him. Why? That seems like it would be an interesting thread to follow, so predictably it’s ignored. That unfortunately leaves the whole thing without much of a hook to hang itself on. It’s presented as kind of a semi-classy period true crime tale, which is how most Jack The Ripper tales end up as fragmented non-stories -- true-life adaptations can be tricky because they tend to involve a lot of characters and plots which don’t neatly tie together. But this one is a little harder to understand, because aside from there being a killer in London in the 1800s, there’s not a single other detail which the films shares with the real Jack The Ripper story. So it’s a little harder to understand why Franco didn’t do more to craft an actual narrative of some kind here. It’s a solid scenario, but there’s not really any “plot” to speak of, just Jack seeing a new victim and killing her off, and then other characters in other sub”plots” talking a little about it.

Now, you’re probably saying “why didn’t Franco do more?” Are you fucking serious? The answer is he’s Franco, “not doing more” is pretty much his defining auteurial characteristic. But as Franco films go, this one is actually surprisingly competent in some ways which you wouldn’t expect. It’s actually a somewhat nice-looking movie at times, with great use of hard lighting and deep shadow. Co-cinematographer Peter Baumgartner’s other movie credits include titles like RANCH OF THE NYMPHOMANIAC GIRLS, SWEDISH NYMPHO SLAVES, AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BEDS and SEX ADVENTURES OF THE THREE MUSKETEERS so I guess by process of elimination I’ve gotta credit second co-cinematographer Peter Spoerri (in his only film as cinematographer in a lengthy career as a producer and production manager) for his handsome use of backlit fog and brazen super closeups of Kinski’s face. Even on the crappy VHS rip you can tell this looks pretty good, and the stills from the new German Blu-Ray by Ascot Elite look genuinely fetching. If it weren’t for the crappy dub job and artless gratuitous nudity, you could almost forget this was the work of a guy who was comfortable making seven movies in 1976 alone (although I guess the random abruptness of the ending might be a hint.) Take a look:

In fact, with a handsome look, convincing period costuming, and Kinski in the lead, this is a rare Franco film which actually flirts with being a real movie. Shame it doesn’t really have much to offer beyond that. I'm as weirded out that I have to say this as you are, but this is one case where Franco should have gone sleazier.

*Though in fairness, it’s also spawned about as many stuffy over-mannered procedurals as it has lurid rape movies, as we see in MURDER BY DECREE and the 1988 Michael Caine starring mini-series JACK THE RIPPER.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2016 CHECKLIST!

Good Kill Hunting

ALIAS	JACK THE RIPPER, no “Jess Franco’s”
TAGLINE	Close Your Eyes and Whisper His Name. I have no idea what that means, and watching the movie doesn’t make it any cleaerer.
TITLE ACCURACY	Uhhh, I think they do talk about “Jack The Ripper” here, but otherwise it has nothing in common with the real life case.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Switzerland/ West Germany, but with a Spanish director
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Serial Killer, Slasher, True Crime (sorta)
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None. Josephine Chaplin, maybe? She was Charlie Chaplin’s daughter and appeared in LIMELIGHT (uncredited, as a child) and a Pasolini movie. But she was also directed by Menahem Golan before Franco came calling.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Klaus Kinski, Jesus Franco
NUDITY?	Yes, I think “Jack” rips at least the top off every woman he kills, plus there’s a few full frontals in there, a few even while they’re not immediately being murdered.
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, “Jack” rapes at least one of the women while murdering her. Ick.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	None
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	None
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	“Jack’s” greenhouse accomplice calls the incoming bodies “dolls,” and not in a pet name sort of way. But she doesn’t do anything interesting with them.
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	Well, “Jack” is definitely pretty nutty
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Oddly I can’t recall any. “Jack” tends to approach his victims more or less straight-on
MORAL OF THE STORY	Even if you do see visions of your hooker mom leering at you at night, you would probably still be better off not murdering a bunch of 19th-century British streetwalkers. Seems like a real hassle. But if you MUST do that, at least don’t leave a superpowered blind man as a witness.