Winchester

 "Inspired by true events"

 Hollywood to English translation: Tidal wave of bullshit incoming.

 Anyone with an interest in supernatural odds and ends might be familiar with the Winchester mystery house. It begun its life as a large farmhouse, and it was slowly expanded into a haphazard mansion of 500-odd rooms and twisty passages by the heiress of the Winchester fortune (as in Winchester rifles), who designed the extensions and oversaw construction herself. Reputedly it's one of the most haunted houses in the US - the strange architecture was supposed to confuse and trap the ghosts of the victims of the fruits of her family business; As you might imagine that reputation was created whole-cloth half a century after her death to lure morbid tourists. Even the more innocuous factoid that says the construction work on the house carried on without reprieve for years, day and night, is completely made up. Oh well.

 Not that there's any danger of anyone ever taking anything presented in Winchester, the fictionalization of this fiction, seriously. It's an incredibly silly movie.

 One fine day in 1906, or so the movie would have us believe, The Winchester company approached Dr. Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to evaluate Sarah Winchester's (Helen Mirren!) mental health with a view to remove her from the board of directors.

 Dr. Price is a really fun character; His tragic backstory will predictably weigh the plot down later, but he gets a great introduction as a laudanum junkie entertaining three hookers with prestidigitation and crappy self-help hokum, and he remains a bright and agreeably agnostic presence for most of the movie. When confronted with a barrage of spooks and haunts in the house, for example, he just assumes he's tripping balls.

 The good doctor arrives at the house (it would only be called the mystery house when it was turned into a tourist attraction) and meets the lady of the house's niece (Sarah Snook) and her young son (Finn Scicluna-O'Prey), who, despite good performances, are only ever there to give the film a child in peril plotline.

 The niece explains to Dr. Price that he'll need to follow the house rules, which is an excuse to lay out the more earthly elements of the house mythology (confusing architecture, a ridiculous staircase, trap corridors, a horde of people working on it at all times), with a few very cheesy jump scares to (not very subtly) hint at the supernatural component of the story.

 Once the doctor finally starts running his sessions with the Winchester scion, he finds out she's a fiercely intelligent and willful old woman who nonetheless entertains a bunch of truly batshit notions. To wit: the spirits of the people killed by the rifles that bear her name come to the house, where she lures them into rooms custom built for them, and she tries to talk them into shedding their earthly burdens. Or something like that. It's a needlessly complicated metaphysical construct that makes entirely too much cheesy sense: on the one hand it's stupid enough to make you wince, on the other it lacks any mystery whatsoever.

 The fun arrives with a murderous spirit that is not willing to talk things over. His arrival coincides with the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake (which did actually topple a tower in the house) and it adds some sorely needed urgency to the movie. But the script (by Tom Vaughan and directors Michael and Peter Spierig) can't really find a satisfying way to handle the plot, leading to some ridiculous developments that are neither satisfying nor scary nor wholly fun. It's kind of interesting, at least?

 The story is a bust, but the script is not a complete loss. The characters are mostly well written and their dialog is engaging (except when providing exposition); This is the rare horror movie that's better when nothing fantastical is happening. All the actors do a great job, too - pretty much a given, with the talent involved.

 And the surfaces of the film are also top-notch. The directors were given mostly free reign to shoot in the real Winchester mystery house, and they, along with their regular cinematographer Ben Nott, beautifully capture the bizarre mansion in moody, creepy detail and elegant camera sweeps. If only their talents were in service of a better script... Still, can't really absolve them, seeing as how they did enough revisions to it to be credited as co-writers.

 I mean, they could have removed the (multiple!) jump scares featuring spooky roller skates, at least.

 

 Yes, it's an extremely dumb movie that's not nearly as much fun as it should be. But it's handsomely made, and engaging, in its own daft, intermittent way. It's a shame that it seems to have driven the Spierig brothers away from making movies, because their technical work here (and elsewhere) is excellent.

Undead

 Here's another Australian zombie apocalypse movie directed by two brothers that gets by on cheap CGI effects, lots of gore, an outlandish concept and industrial amounts of enthusiasm. Made about a decade before the first Wyrmwood film, too.

 Undead was written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, who pooled their life savings to finance it (giving them the producer role as well, by default). It's a very bloody piss take on 50's sci-fi schlock with a plot that's got more than a passing resemblance to Plan 9 From Outer Space.

 Things kick off with René (Felicity Mason, doing a lot of her acting just with her striking grey eyes) trying to get out of the small Australian fishing town of Berkeley on the same day that meteorites start falling from the sky and turn people into ghouls. The undead invasion puts a hamper on her plans, so she's forced to take shelter in a derelict farm along with a young couple (Rob Jenkins and Lisa Cunningham) and two police officers (Dirk Hunter and Emma Randall). Said farm is actually something called "Marion's World of Weapons", and Marion (Mungo McKay) lurks inside, armed to the teeth.

 Fortunately for everyone, he's the good kind of well-armed survivalist nutjob: one who had a forewarning of the doomsday, and turned out to be right. He carries around a triple shotgun (reminded me of the sword from The Sword and the Sorcerer) and pulls silly/cool moves like throwing his guns in the air, shooting a zombie with a shotgun, then catching the guns again and shooting two more zombies. His usage of spurs got a chuckle.

 Because this is a zombie movie, you have to have internecine tension. In this case, the policeman turns out to be an incompetent dick, and no one trusts poor Marion despite the fact that he saves their bacon multiple times. And there's also the matter of this not being your garden variety day of the dead; there's a sort of acid rain, rays of light sucking people and crickets up into the sky, a newly-built wall around the whole of the town, mysterious robed figures...

 The plot ends up making some amount of sense (as long as you don't look at it too closely or start asking questions), but the script is... well, it's not very good. That it's mainly a purposefully kitsch comedy excuses a lot of the internal consistency and logic issues, but then you're left with gags that just aren't very funny, and the actors aren't up to redeeming either the comedy or the action. Poor McKay really struggles with selling Marion as an Ash-like badass, and the less said of some of the others' relentless mugging the better.

 It strikes me as a film that was designed with the visuals in mind, and had the rest hitched to them later. And there's some varied and striking imagery to be found here; It's heavily stylized, too, which helps it look good despite its homemade quality and desaturated palette. The gore is also fun, with maybe a little more in the way of physical blood and prosthesis than other films like this (though some of the CGI, being low budget and two decades old, is pretty bad).

 Despite its superficial similarities, it's unfair to compare it to the Wyrmwood movies - those were much more straightforward in their ambitions. Unfortunately, Undead kind of fails in its own terms, but it's an interesting, likeable, and entertaining sort of failure. It did serve its purpose as a calling card, letting the Spierigs go on to helm two of the more idiosyncratic sci fi films of the following decade.