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!