D

There's not a ton to like about the new movie, which neither scares, thrills, nor sickens.

It would appear that any time writer Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey) has read or seen a production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, he must’ve thought to himself “Yeah, well, that’s a pretty good play, but I can kick it up a notch.” That’s the inescapable conclusion of seeing this odd adaptation of one of the Bard’s most famous love story. Fellowes makes so many strange choices that I’m at a loss to understand.

Adam Scott's comedy vehicle manages to score a few laughs with its over-the-top familial disfunction, but it is not enough to carry an entire movie.

I'm not certain, but I’d guess that the writer of the screenplay for We Are What We Are (a remake of a 2010 Mexican film) started with its final gruesome scenes and then assembled a back-story that would lead to them. This movie exists so you can remark to your friends afterwards how — holy hell! — they have got to see the crazy stuff that goes down during the climax of this tale of the reclusive Parker family. Their secrets are unburied after Mrs. Parker mysteriously dies in the midst of a shopping trip. It’s a doctor (Michael Parks) in their small upstate New York town who slowly unravels the horror that’s been passed down from generation to generation. Unfortunately, the truth about what’s going on is so obvious so early in the film that when the revelation finally comes it feels as though the characters are catching up to our knowledge instead of the other way around.  Until then there’s a lot of twiddling of thumbs, waiting for the story to get there.

The sequel to 2010's Insidious, director James Wan proves with Insidious: Chapter 2 that he's never met an uninspired horror movie trope that he wouldn't employ. Let's play a good, old-fashioned game of Horror Movie Bingo to see how close he came to making his film a frightening classic.