Please God, strike this movie down. Even by horror standards, 616 Wilford Lane is impressively bad. Like something a toddler would make in a kitchen, the movie is a tasteless mixture of whichever cliches seemed to suite the writers at any given moment. Young-adult, horror, Hallmark holiday specials - we've got it all here and it goes together just as well as you'd expect. Then, like a wad of hand-lotion in your child's ketchup and dried bean chocolate soup, we get this masterclass-of-failure ending. [spoiler] The family is a group of con-artists who want to scam a real estate agency out of millions by faking a haunting at a murder house. Then, Staci kills Randy and Jim before getting away in a car. Yeah... This is not the right way to do plot twists. There's no way to figure their identities out from the story, we just get a sudden revelation at the end. This both robs the characters of any development because we never really know them, but also means the movie has been a colossal waste of time. [/spoiler] If you want a bad movie for the night, there are a ton of better options. Rent anything other than this over-produced skid mark.

**_Weird happenings at a jaw-dropping manor in California_**

A grieving man (John Littlefield) and his two girls (Alyson Gorske & Jessica Chancellor) move to a town in Northern California where he purchased an incredible mansion at a curiously low price. When strange things start happening, they hear rumors of the manor’s infamous past. Jasmine Waltz is on hand as the sultry realtor while Eric Roberts plays an amiable neighbor.

“616 Wilford Lane” (2021) has the setting of “Glass House: The Good Mother” (2006), an awesome mansion in sunny California, but with an altogether different story, à la spooky goings-on in the manner of M. Night Shyamalan mixed with “The Amityville Horror” (1979/2005). There’s a creepy element that goes back to the "Amelia" episode of “Trilogy of Terror” (1975), just don’t expect a crazy Zuni doll.

The flick works well as is, but the creators insisted on tacking on an ending that I don’t want to say too much about. It can still be enjoyed yet the “creative” climax lowers my grade. It just wasn’t needed.

The three key women are a highlight with Jessica standing out.

The movie runs 1 hour, 25 minutes, and was shot in California, presumably Auburn, which is 25-30 miles northeast of Sacramento in Northern Cal.

GRADE: B-