A horror movie with honest family values, but not much terrors.

We begin with little Rosario wearing a white dress-all sweet and innocent-and celebrating at a party. She’s the kind of girl who would never dream that her abuela (that means Grandma in Spanish) would be involved with something dark and sinister. The kind where she would wonder why she’s bleeding, and the kind when the old lady would tell her: “My beliefs are not yours.”

Then we flash forward to the future when Rosario has grown up to become Rose (Emeraude Toubia), a Wall Street broker, never dreaming her abuela’s horrors would resurface. Just as a blizzard is coming, she receives a phone call saying her abuela has passed away. She then goes to her apartment to see her, but her abode has the makings of a demonic horror film. Complete with bugs and markings on her corpse, and a hidden room that looks more like a cave complete with creepy artifacts.

So that would be the set-up and concept of the new horror movie “Rosario.” It has the right intentions on representing family values and what comes out of it, but in the horror genre, it ends up being derivative. We basically get the same supernatural attacks over and over again, and they end up losing our interests in what the story is trying to engage us in.

Because of this blizzard, the police have other major emergencies to get to and Rose can’t safely leave the apartment. So, she might as well figure out what the old lady has gotten herself into, and how to get herself out of it. It’s more in the results of somebody making a deal with the devil.

In the latest trend of horror films, we also get David Dastmalchain as Joe, the creepy neighbor, who comes over claiming the deceased has his air fryer. Is he really after her air fryer? Because Rose suggests that she never would have used one since she was Mexican. Those are her suggestions, not mine.

“Rosario” looks and feels like an independent horror movie with the direction by newcomer Felipe Vargas and the cinematography by Carmen Cabana. It uses Mexican themes to represent the title heroine’s family and the circumstances they’ve went through in order to give her a perfect life in America. And Toubia does a lively job trying to be serious about her demonic situation, while trying to joke about it a bit with “FU”s. It sounds obligatory, but at least she doesn’t need to act so dull about it.

But it’s sort of hard to care about the overall experience, as the storyline gets confusing and the supernatural horrors just come and go. And you can easily tell it’s not your dead loved ones talking if they blame you for their life troubles. I was more interested in what Rosario’s grandmother has gotten herself into, than I was with the actual demon surprise attacks. And quite frankly, those scenes are boring and routine. You can hide under the bed all you want, but they’ll still get you.

“Rosario” has the potential to be a perfect horror film on a smaller scale for all the reasons I’ve mentioned. But we don’t need to enter “Conjuring” territory with the scares.