Passed down? Nah, just a pass thanks.

You're probably acutely aware of the fact that there is some sort of football tournament happening as we speak; I have no love at all for what I consider to be one of the three dullest sports ever created (tennis and golf being the other two). I have successfully avoided pretty much all direct contact with The World Cup partially at least because I find a majority of football fans (I know, I know, not all. Some of my very good friends follow avidly and aren't complete assholes, so it is possible)  become belligerent idiots at the drop of hat and footballers themselves appear to suffer from a severe case of either brittle bone disease or vertigo, with the amount of time they spend squawking in agony or rolling around on the floor. It was perhaps once a noble sport, but sadly no longer. Apparently though, according to Facebook at least, it's "coming home" which seems to be a fairly presumptuous statement at best. In an attempt to avoid the acute boredom of yet another televised match, I had a bit of an extravagant Saturday afternoon/night and watched not one but two entire movies, one at the cinema and one at home. It didn't work out exactly as well as I'd planned.

Hereditary was being heralded as this generation's Exorcist, whereas Winchester was being heralded as nothing of the sort. The former did have praise heaped upon it whereas I don't remember hearing much of a peep about the latter. I'm sorry to say I bit somewhat on the hype machine for Hereditary and frankly I'm annoyed at myself because it doesn't live up to it. Not even remotely. Winchester was enjoyable crap on the other hand, so I don't feel quite so bad about it.

The main problem with movies nowadays across the board is the marketing. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was a perfect example of way too much going into the trailers and Hereditary is a classic case of the trailer being creepier than the film. If you go by the trailer, it's been shoved in with all those demonic possession movies you've seen a thousand times over but when you watch the movie it's an entirely different story. It's a pretty tired cliché at this point but all the genuinely creepy bits are in the trailer.

I think the reason Hereditary got as much praise as it did is at least some way because there is some decent film making going on, it just happens that the plot is dull and ultimately bored me into checking my watch twice. The saving grace was that it didn't at least feel as long as the 2 hours it is but only just. There are vast swathes of time where basically nothing really happens. It's an examination of grief and loss more than anything else, but I suspect that's a pretty tough sell as a movie in its own right so they obviously and wisely chose to sell it on its horror elements. Which are... well not especially horrific until the final third of the movie where things do start happening but by that time I was so deeply entrenched in the tedium that I couldn't muster any sort of response. Typically, modern horror broadly divides itself into three camps; creep scares where weird things make you petrified to go anywhere on your own for the following week, jump scares which make you worried about opening fridges or looking over your shoulder in a mirror or gore porn which makes you wonder how Eli Roth still has a career and why anyone would want to emulate that. Hereditary sort of attempts a bit of the creepy stuff but fails dismally; there was nothing on screen throughout the entire film that I brought away with me, the opposite of things like Sinister which actually stuck with me for a few days, or Ghostbusters (when I was about 8 I might add) when I was petrified there was a Terror Dog in my wardrobe. There's a bit of gore knocking about at the end as well, but not a lot and it failed to induce any sort of response other than guffaws sadly; the headless corpse floating up to the tree house is genuinely, if unintentionally, funny to watch which really ruins the mood they're going for.

Aside from that, I was genuinely disappointed by the acting. You have a pretty solid cast to work with here. Gabriel Byrne, Toni Collette, the main kid from Jumanji 2. Seriously, he's awful. He conjures up a half decent sad/scared face but when he starts ugly sobbing and crying for his Mommy, it's a full bag of salty cringe please and a large glass of please-god-make-it-stop to wash everything down with. Toni Collette is pretty convincing in the grief support group scene, but elsewhere is just shrill and annoying and you can't wait for something to leap out of a cupboard and skewer her with something unyielding. This sadly never happens and I'm not going to spoil her denouement but unsatisfying is one word. Hilariously squelchy are two more. The weird looking girl in the trailer actually doesn't do as much as you're led to believe and is basically only there to set up the tongue clicking gimmick that has people on Twitter terrified because we're slowly turning into a society of wusses apparently. This is a film that relies on gimmicks way, way too much but doesn't pay them off even remotely well enough. The fore-shadowing is absolutely shocking as well; "Does that have nuts in it?" asks Gabriel Byrne about two minutes into proceedings. Gee, I wonder if someone's going to have an allergic reaction somewhere down the line. Also, if you aren't sure your audience is astute enough to read the right section of the important book you're showing them, make sure you physically highlight it for them. Better still, right at the end, after everything's been brought to its accidentally chucklesome end, make sure you have an actual voice off-camera fully explain what just happened; just in case your film making is too subtle (or not smart enough , I can't decide which) to clue the audience in without it.

A lot of Hereditary's problems are not necessarily the film's fault; it has more in common with the 70's horrors like Rosemary's Baby or The Exorcist than modern day horrors (it's not anywhere near as good as either) but it was marketed at a very modern crowd who were expecting something much different to what they got. Winchester on the other hand was a stupid jump-scare popcorn movie with no pretence towards intellectualism and was enjoyable crap. Probably says more about me, right?