Today I put it all on the line and faced my fears, all in the name of MovieBuzzers. I watched one of the few recently Hollywood horrors that genuinely gives me what’s commonly referred to as ‘the willies’. This is a truly creepy film, and one that if you dare, should save for the early hours of the morning when you’re alone, here’s The Strangers.
We’ll ignore the terrifically awful opening ‘based on real events’ messaged that takes this common horror vice one step further by including a cheesy voice over. The Strangers really starts with two scared boys ringing 911 after they’ve just discovered the bodies of our victims. Cut back a couple of hours and we meet James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler). The two don’t look best pleased and when they get back to the house they’re staying at, in the middle of nowhere, creepy things begin to happen. It starts with a girl knocking at their door at 4am, and when James sends her quite politely on her way he goes out to get some cigarettes. The girl keeps coming back to the door while Kristen is on her own and we see another masked figure lurking around the house with her, trying to mess with her head. Once James arrives he’s skeptical but the group soon begins to torment the both of them. With the lines dead, their car destroyed and stuck in the middle of nowhere it’s a test to see whether or not James and Kristen can survive until daylight.
While the film appeals to us with the perfect amount of tension and anticipation using that deserted atmospheric feel, it trails off slowly during the halfway point before fully plummeting with the under-whelming ending. The set up is more than enough to hook us in from the get go, after all, who wouldn’t be freaked out by someone repeatedly knocking at the door at 4am – and you’d probably be in a populated area, not in the middle of nowhere. The time frame of 4am alone is enough to make you feel alone, add into the mix that these characters are actually alone in an area with nobody to contact and that idea is enough to terrify. But it’s the typical stupidity of the characters that begins to frustrate, and it makes you not really care about their fates. They’re pretty one dimensional and do everything straight out of the horror victim manual. Nothing beats when Liv Tyler gets through to the police finally on a DAB radio and instead of saying exactly where she is, as time is limited for her, she simple says “help me” – yeah, good one!
The Strangers deserved a better pay off, and so did we. For all that build up it was a shame they couldn’t close the film out well, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult for filmmakers to write a satisfying ending to a horror film. Regardless of the weak ending, The Strangers is still a terrifyingly fun film, and in an extremely rare case, an improvement on ‘Them‘ the European original on which The Strangers is based/remade from. The story is pretty merciless, never really giving our ‘heroes’ a fighting chance as the three masked killers stalk, taunt and terrorise Speedman and Tyler throughout pretty much the whole film. There’s no real motive and it makes it worse that we never see the killers’ faces, not even when they take their masks off, succumbing to the notion that evil has no face. That leaves for some creepy viewing, that these people were truly strangers who just wanted to hurt someone. The Strangers also doesn’t feature too much gore which is refreshing in a modern era packed full of blood and guts, instead sticking true to its trailer-promised style and simply being a freaky deaky film.
Rating: One to watch alone in the early hours to really get a good scaring! (6/10)
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