Tag: Julia Garner

I have found the month of October to be pretty disappointing in regards to major horror releases. All we got for a wide release was the Carrie remake. There aren’t even any Paranormal Activities, because the next one got pushed back to January. Yes, I find them pretty bad now, but come on, just Carrie?

That is where the indie theaters step in. They have one more addition to the month, We Are What We Are, a remake of a Mexican film of the same name from a few years prior. Well, same name, but in Spanish.

The religious elements are exemplified in the foreign version, where every male is named Jesus.

The Parker family is a strange family. They mostly keep to themselves, the dad, Frank (Bill Sage), his two daughters, Rose (Julia Garner) and Iris (Ambyr Childers), and their younger brother who doesn’t know much, Rory (Jack Gore).

Doesn’t know much? Yeah, because he is young and hasn’t learned a lot yet. He knows about Jesus. But he hasn’t learned anything about math, or science, or books, or their family secret.

Oooh, a family secret. You can probably figure out what it is. Look at the creepy fucking photos. I mean, I could tell what their secret was just by reading a small plot description and seeing the cover.

Well, they totally do that. But then a big rain storm happens, and it causes flooding. Flooding that might accidentally tear up enough ground to reveal their secret, that they have kept in the family hidden for over a hundred years. I am sure no one in the town is smart enough to figure it out. Oh, except for the wily Doc Barrow (Michael Parks), who doesn’t know he is about to discover a secret that big, but is just looking for his missing daughter, and enlists the help of a local deputy (Wyatt Russell).

That ain’t bean juice there, fellas.

Outside of their family secret, there is not a lot of surprising things about this movie. It is not your standard horror, that is for sure. There isn’t a killer stalking victims throughout, all of the deaths are quick and not built up for tension.

In fact, the whole movie is kind of set up like a regular drama. It moves incredibly slow, with the family just doing their thing, the doctor just doing his investigation, until a confrontation near the end. Because of the downpour, the dad is off doing other things, and so the two daughters have to take part in their family activity for the first real time on their own. So that is a bit awkward and creepy.

I really enjoyed the ending, I think it made sense from the build up. However, the time it took for the build up to occur is what killed me. It is a rather slow moving movie. Even though the payoff at the end is worth it, I still dislike how I wasn’t really scared or completely freaked out until that point. At that point I wanted to vomit a little bit.

But hey, at least we have an alternative scary movie this month in theaters…kind of!

It looks like The Last Exorcism went the route of Blair Witch Project. Let me explain.

Blair Witch Project of course redefined horror, viral marketing, and basically introduced us to the found footage genre of film. The Last Exorcism didn’t do any of that, it was just another documentary based film. However (even if you never realized it), Blair Witch Project had a sequel, the Book Of Shadows and it was a “normal film” without the shaky cam feature.

Basically, this was a long winded way of saying that The Last Exorcism Part II also has switched filming techniques to the more standard technique. Just because “Book Of Shadows” was basically shunned and forgotten about with time, doesn’t mean that TLEp2 will also be shitty.

Oh fuck me. What the hell is this poster?

This takes place hours after the first film, with Nell (Ashley Bell) being pretty dang freaky and possessed, running around other peoples homes. Don’t worry, they fix her up real nice. She gets sent off to a group home for troubled girls, after a nice psychological breakdown and she is fixed into realizing that possessions aren’t real and no one is out to get her.

Just kidding.

In fact, now that she is in the heart of New Orleans, everything is a lot weirder, especially when she starts seeing visions of her dad and other villagers, including nightmares of her past acts. But she wants to be normal! Not the crazy girl from the cult! She wants a boyfriend (Spencer Treat Clark), real friends (Julia Garner), and not a demon trying to seduce her into a killing fire making machine!

Too bad fate is a bitch. David Jensen, who looks far too much like Edward James Olmos, plays the helpful group home caretaker, and tries to keep her on the path away from all this religious mumbo-jumbo.

I guess this is that new alternative massage and exorcism technique.

I apologize for the lack of detail in the plot description. Unfortunately, the first movie ends with a twist, and I don’t want to spoil that movie just to explain this one better! Who am I to give away one twist ending to help you figure out the sequel? This movie gives you a brief recap of the first movie events at the start, but does a pretty poor job of it.

When you compare part II to part I, part II is just a mess. Gone is any sort of subtlety, as from beginning to the end, it is entirely full of jump scares and hallucinations. In fact, a scene in the first film where Nell jumps at the camera and screams (a literal jump scare) is spliced into this film at least four times, thanks to Nell’s nightmares. It is weird that in her dreams she is imagining herself wild from someone else’s point of view, yeah?

This movie was so bad that by the end, I thought they were going to actually forget to include an exorcism. The exorcism in question was extremely different than your average movie exorcism, so there is a unique plus.  Unfortunately, most of the film is based on the plot from the last 10 minutes of the previous film, which in itself was confusing and left you with questions. Did this film answer the questions? Not at all! They basically ignored them and brought up even more confusing plot lines.

While the end of part I was rushed and confusing, the ending of this film is actually laughable and definitely bad. It almost felt Carrie-esque, but with no sense of fear involved. I was shaking my head the entire last few minutes, ready to get out of this mess of a film.