We Are Still Here is a really solid horror flick, let down only by a bit of a jumbled script that doesn't completely do justice to it's pretty cool central concept (a gory haunted house story with monster-in-the-basement jump scares and Lovecraftian overtones.) While it isn't the instant classic some people here are claiming, neither is it the disaster others say... "boring" - is an accusation I've seen thrown at it a few times by reviewers, I'm assuming, raised on a diet Saw sequels who think that Eli Roth is a horror auteur. It's definitely a movie that punches above it's weight: the story moves at a good clip, building from some modest jump scares to a climax filled with proper 80s style, non-CGI gore effects (exploding heads, eye gouging, and geysers of blood flying everywhere). I think it's pretty cool that they went with a more mature cast instead of the usual bunch of anonymous teens: it was really fantastic to see Re-Animator scream queen Barbarah Crampton get her teeth into a role that required her to do more than simply look scared - her character has quite a bit of emotional depth, and she pulled off the mix the steely determination and heartbroken melancholy that her character demanded with grace and style. As for the whole conversation about Lisa Marie's plastic surgery - I actually thought it worked for her character, who seemed to be the kind of spaced out West Coast wannabe moon-goddess type who might have had a past in acting or modeling... maybe it was typecasting, but whatever. The people freaked out by it obviously are not used to seeing leading roles going to people who are over 21, because to me everybody seemed pretty well cast. The most forgettable characters were actually the young couple who show up midway through only to be dispatched within 10 minutes. The film's main problem is the script. It sets up a great concept, but then doesn't seem to know what to do with it. There's an attempt to create a mythology, but when you think about it too hard it starts to trip up over itself. It's all well and good to have this complex back-story, but the story has to play by it's own rules, and this one doesn't: for example, why did the undead family haunting the house not turn on the denizens of the town before? They obviously hated them, yet they dutifully did their bidding every 30 years, right up until this time around? Doesn't make sense. Plus the whole needing a blood sacrifice to keep the evil inside the house ting didn't make hold together, because surely as soon as the first people had been killed (i.e. The young couple) then the sacrifice was done, so there was no need to kill anyone else, unless Im missing something. Plus its pretty bad form to keep hinting about this awful evil that will erupt out of the bowels of the earth if the sacrifice doesn't go as planned, and then not follow through by either letting the evil loose or convincingly vanquishing it. At the end they seem to be building up to SOMETHING coming up from the basement, and then.... nothing. It felt like they wrote themselves into a corner,then decided to cut the story short with that too-abrupt ambivalent ending. But that said, if you check you expectations and take it for what it is, WE ARE STILL HERE is still a well made, engaging horror flick with a great atmosphere, interesting concept, and enough shocks and gore to keep jaded, old school horror fans happy. Check it out...
Review of We Are Still Here
