Just the Ticket #183: The Winter Witch

Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. The Summer Ticketmaster.

You all know by now that I am a critical but stalwart Zenescope fan, meaning that I can appreciate their work for its big moments and ambition despite its many flaws and early missteps. But rarely has the company's output led me to consume external media that I hate, and my research for Wednesday's Retrospective on The Winter Witch has done just that.

In the article I mentioned there, the author shares the history of the character Mother Holle, a.k.a Frau Perchta, a witch of winter and fate who rewards the beautiful, industrious, and kind with riches and sweets, and punishes those who are ugly, evil, and lazy by disembowelment and filling their stomach cavities with stones.
Let's just say that despite its apparent lack of budget, I won't be giving 2022's The Winter Witch any riches or sweets today.
Written and directed by Richard John Taylor (director of three of the many, many low-budget British films about the infamous Kray twins), The Winter Witch follows Ingrid (Rose Hakki), a reporter for a failing print newspaper in the 2020s whose boss thinks that child disappearances steeped in Germanic and Slavic folklore are his ticket to financial security. The rub is that these disappearances are happening in Ingrid's hometown where she saw her mother and sister brutally murdered by the aforementioned Frau Perchta (though the characters, even Ingrid's grandmother, Omi, played by frequent Taylor collaborator Rula Lenska, pronounce it "pretcha"). And because Ingrid is a dumbass with an 80s April O'Neil level of workaholism, she brings her daughter, Eleanor (Evie Hughes), with her while she investigates the child-murdering ghost-witch.
What ensues from this flimsy financial fuckery of a plot contrivance (actually, it's just a contrivance because things have to happen for a movie to have a plot) is an abundance of admittedly beautiful establishing shots, pointless and overly dramatic dialogue, menial labor as the alleged reporter wastes time thinking about fixing up and moving into her old house and checking up on her sick grandmother instead of doing her job (a few scenes earlier, Ingrid was established as being such a workaholic that she would needlessly endanger her own child, yet she doesn't do anything investigative until almost an hour into the movie), and so. Much. Walking!
The horror in this alleged horror movie amounts to cheap, generic jumpscares (the number of which you can count on one hand with a few fingers cut off), a barely noticeable digital smoke effect that creeps around the frame when Frau Perchta is near (we barely get to see her in full, and she looks like this),
and gore effects that you can count on your other hand if you cut off all of your fingers because there is no gore in this collection of dialogue, scenery shots, "Carol Of the Bells" needle-drops, and chore TikToks masquerading as a Christmas horror movie.
Then, Ingrid's badass ex husband (Jimmy "The Bee" Bennett)—who somehow didn't get custody of Eleanor despite Ingrid being willing to bring her within jurisdiction of a homicidal witch-ghost for a paycheck and let her "play in the woods"—yeah, he suddenly shows up at the perfect time just because, and the family make it home safely through the power of editing.
But wait! Ingrid's five minutes of phone calls and eighty-plus minutes of child endangerment saved the paper after all! And there's another possible supernatural crime somewhere that only Ingrid can solve because that apparently does make for compelling, credible news in this movie's Universe, and maybe there was going to be a sequel to this boring piece of shit.
F+ (Those establishing shots really are gorgeous)

Next week, more Winter Witch (the Zenescope one, not whatever this was) and an Independence Day slasher movie try to raise the content quality, so Stay Tuned and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I don't get murdered in the woods in another cheaply bad British horror movie, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my beautifully established content.

Ticketmaster,
Out Of the Woods.

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