FIXER UPPER

Hope everybody had a great Super Bowl Sunday. Along with a few minutes each of the Puppy and Kitten Bowls, this is what I watched during the big game:

Winchester--This horror yarn wasn't screened in advance for critics, at least not here in the Valley. It's set in the Winchester Mansion in San Jose, in 1906, and stars the great Helen Mirren as a Sarah Winchester, heir to the gun company's fortune.

Enthusiasts of occult lore will know that Mrs. Winchester was a real person, and her massive, rambling house still stands, and is a popular tourist attraction. It's claimed that she was haunted by guilt over the horrific bloodshed the family business had facilitated over the years, and that her constant and seemingly random additions to her home were intended to accommodate the ghosts of these casualties. Hence the place is sometimes hyped as the most haunted house in America.

It's not certain if, or to what extent, this is apocryphal, but the movie is a tall tale.  Mirren makes an imperious entrance and lends a certain understated dignity to the proceedings, dressed throughout in widow's black. But most of the screen time is carried by Jason Clarke, as a washed-up, laudanum-addicted doctor from San Francisco with a tragic past, who has been pressed into service to get the old lady declared mentally incompetent. He's a skeptic, of course, so that he can be shaken up by the rather brazen specters that start appearing to him almost immediately.

The result, directed by the German-born, Australia-raised identical-twin filmmaking team of Michael and Peter Spierig, trades in very old-school, and mostly low-tech, scares. From the opening title on, the film had the feel of a haunted house drive-in shocker of the '70s, like The Legend of Hell House or The House of Seven Corpses, with lingering atmosphere shots of the house's spires and gables and cupolas, and lengthy scenes of characters prowling the halls investigating creepy sounds, telling themselves that their fears are all in their heads. I thought they might find the Cowardly Lion's admission more comforting: "I do believe in spooks, I do I do I do..."

The jolts are conventional, but the Spierigs come up with some crafty variations in the timing. Winchester isn't an especially good movie, but it has a throwback feel I couldn't help but like.

Check out February's issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column  on brunch joints.