The Strangers: Rating: 1 stars

A mask-wearing trio stalks a young couple in their rural home.

The Strangers (2008)
2008 · UR · Horror
Reviewed December 11, 2008

Kristen and James, a young couple who have just broken up, are home alone in their dark house in the middle of the dark woods, well into a very dark night. Would this be a good time for creepy, masked, super-fast people to start messing with their minds and maybe trying to kill them? Yes. Yes it would.

The summary sounds pretty stupid, and the movie delivers on the summary — this isn’t a horror movie, it’s a what-was-that-noise-oh-nothing movie. I think the writers were going for slow-building suspense, which I always prefer to flat-out mayhem, but it built so slowly that I nearly fell asleep. The only thing keeping me awake was my urge to snark at the idiot characters, both of them the kinds of stock horror victims who do such incredibly stupid things that they deserve to get killed. Example: when it has been established that the villains are already moving freely about the house both inside and out, the last thing you would want to do is suggest to your girlfriend that she stays inside the house while you go outside for a look around. Unless you are still rankling over the fact that she dumped you, and are hoping that she gets what’s coming to her. (Which is another thing: doesn’t dumping someone mean you are no longer responsible for their safety? Call me a bitch, but if a guy who had just blown me off called in a panic and begged me to come back and save him from the baddies, I would just cackle and hang up on him. But then, anybody who’s ever dated me would probably assume that I sent the baddies in the first place.)

Still, I hung on, waiting for the payoff… and waiting… and waiting… and then the movie was over, and my husband and I looked at each other and said, “That was it?” Looking back on it, I can point to exactly one single thing I liked about it: a half-minute scene where Tyler’s character, who has been knocked unconscious, is being dragged by her ankles into another room by one of the villains; as she slowly regains consciousness, she grabs and claws weakly, almost lazily, at door frames, baseboards, the floor itself, trying to stop her progress. Something about that image, the way she’s not awake enough to be screaming but alert enough to know what’s happening, is very, very chilling.

But is it worth seeing just for that? Hell naw. This film never scared me, it never made me jump, and I didn’t have any nightmares — and that was with the unrated version. For a movie based on the Manson family murders (and/or the Keddie cabin murders), I was expecting better. FAIL.