We are still here

Reviewed by: Dare Devil Kid (DDK)

Rating: 3.3/5 stars

"We Are Still Here" is the latest iteration of people unwittingly stumbling upon an ancient haunted house, and it succeeds more than it fails, thanks largely to the competent work of first-time director Ted Geoghegan. The Director does a great job in keeping the tension high, teasing his ghastly ghosts with escalating bouts of gore infested violence to make a film that will satisfy both haunted house and gore horror fans.

That's not saying that "We Are Still Here" is up there with some of the best haunted house movies like "The Exorcist", "The Shining", "Poltergeist", or "The Conjuring", but it does offer enough decent scares and some moments of high tension to push it past pastiche. The film mixes stylish, subtle filmmaking with sudden gore effects to deliver a twisted take on the stale and anemic haunted house formula. And though it doesn't match up to the aforementioned classics, "We Are Still Here" stands on its own as a memorable and utterly creepy genre offering that deserves to be seen by horror fans that appreciate something out of the ordinary.

For those who grew up with horror made in the seventies this will be a throwback to that era. Those who are into the new horror genre will find it rather boring. Let me explain it a little bit.

There isn't that much action going on and before it becomes awry you have almost wait for an hour. Before that you will have your jump scenes and the atmosphere that will take you into the horror.

I see that some reviews are talking about unknown thespians but what the hell, Barbara Crampton of the Re-animator franchise fame and Monte Markham, well known in the eighties and seventies.

If you can sit through the first hour you will be surprised to see a lot of bloody and even gory shots. Really something to check out if you are a geek of Italian gory flicks (Fulci style) but if you like the flicks made nowadays avoid it at all costs.

Gore 2/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 3/5 Story 3/5 Comedy 0/5

To be honest, this movie baffled me. Is it absolutely terrible? No. Did it have potential? Yes. But somehow all of it amounted to only this bizarre mess of a film. Let me put something out there first: "We Are Still Here" clocks in at one hour and 17 minutes. At the end I expected there to be 20 more minutes of movie left. The whole thing felt rushed, and the ending was...abrupt, to say the least.

The story follows a couple who move into a new house hoping to move past the death of their son. This is a time-tested plot. However, "We Are Still Here" proceeds to give us almost no information about the son and no time to feel the weight of his parent's grief. It merely establishes that his mother can "feel his presence" in the house before embarking on a series of cheap scares. There are several very sudden character deaths that in a better movie would seem bold. Here they just seem lazy. There is precisely one very creepy moment that would have been perfect if it hadn't immediately transitioned to a series of jump scares (that it was also intercut with Lisa Marie's "acting" didn't help).

The later scenes involve almost cartoonish amounts of gore. If the movie was an intentional horror-comedy this would have been fine. The first 3/4 of the movie seemed to be going for straight horror, though, so I didn't know what to make of it. I could talk about the bad writing and jarringly terrible lighting as well, but what would be the point? It ultimately felt like a short film stretched beyond its limit. The concept would have worked great in a tight 15-20 minutes, where movies can get away with the spareness and ambiguity that "We Are Still Here" features. As it is, though, it feels like a movie that ran out of budget and ideas long before it was truly finished.

I love horror that takes place around houses, conjures presence and unleashes energy. It's the gust of motion I'm after, the familiar geography thrown asunder by metaphysical winds that lift walls. Blood can be there or not, for me it's inhabiting something that is changed in the course, shown to be no thing, illusory, a prank of our investment in the idea of solid reality.

And this is horror that moves fast, dwells and conjures with some purity. Oh the parts are all familiar; old house with a presence in the basement, a bereaved couple moving in, small New England town harboring a secret. Some have likened it to a b-movie of old as if that were a bad thing, in fact that's part of the whole appeal. Not that it pays homage to movies of old as if they should be enshrined in our estimation but that it taps into a kind of energy we've forgotten.

You wouldn't be amiss of thinking of it with Fulci in mind, in those brief years when he could cut portals through his own murk. It's that type of lumbering energy that assuredly emanates from below, stands outside doors and makes floors creak before washing with blood. It knowingly mines that legacy but short of forcing it to be a certain type of film.

The plot is solid enough. The movie is entertaining enough also meaning that if you want something new to watch in the horror genre- this movie is just entertaining enough, The lore could have been improved upon, and with some more back story, perhaps even some flashbacks with some creative storytelling and this film could have been a gem.

The movie at just 84 minutes doesn't provide enough time to the viewer to understand what this evil is that has descended on this family. We are told a few bits a pieces about he first owner who ran a funeral parlour out of this home. Something about the owner Dagmar hiding or selling the bodies and that the house was built on some ancient evil. Other than all that we are left to guess at what the heck the rest of the back story is and what it has to do with the old boiler downstairs.

If only they took another 15 minutes of screen time to flesh out the sordid past and we could have left this movie more satisfied with a true understanding of the houses evil past, where and why and how.

What we are left with is a gore fest with jump scares that are really nothing new. It's just a good old fashioned horror with a 2 star rating.