Let's talk about what makes a horror movie good.
For me, I don't necessarily need to be scared, since I don't get scared at most horror movies, but if it can make me frightened, that's definitely a plus. I guess what I really need is for the movie to make me feel like if I were in the same position as the characters that I would do the same things they do to try to get out of that situation, and that what they're doing would be all that I could do. I need psychological frights, not cheap jolts to my ears when the music spikes to accompany a bad guy leaping into frame.
If you agree with me, don't watch The Strangers which just came out. I would have felt cheated if I hadn't had to pay to see this pile of garbage. It's like the screenwriter and director picked up a document called "How to Make a Horror Movie" and followed its formula to a T.
The first problem The Strangers has is its pacing. It's dreadfully slow. Boring, even. The director, Bryan Bertino (a first-time director, and it shows), is trying to go for something artful here, but long shots of characters walking (seriously, I watched Liv Tyler walk slowly for two minutes solid, at a stretch) doesn't make art. Neither does framing a victim behind bar-like shapes that make them appear to be "trapped" in the frame of the picture. That's not art. That's cliche.
Speaking of cliche, this movie makes its own cliches. By the time I was done watching this flick (if you can call it that), I was prepared to vomit if I had to see one more masked figure walk slowly out of darkness behind somebody. This isn't even scary the first time it happens. Why should I be scared the next fifteen times?
That's not even the worst of it. The characters here are James (Scott Speedman) and Kristen (Liv Tyler), and they must be the flat-out stupidest characters I've ever seen in any horror movie. See, I can suspend my disbelief if a character in a horror flick does something stupid when they're in the height of their distress, but these characters are doing stupid things before the titular tormentors are even in the house.
Kristen gets scared when her boyfriend goes out for a pack of smokes and strange knocking comes on the door. She tries calling him. How incovenient (or rather, how really convenient for a screenwriter) it is that her phone's battery is dead. So she plugs it into the wall. Then she gets a cordless land-line phone and calls James on his cell. Somebody cuts the phone lines in the house. (Cliche!!!) So she runs back to her cell phone, UNPLUGS IT, and marvels that she still has no battery power. She gives up. Any person with any amount of rationality knows that YOU CAN MAKE A PHONE CALL FROM A CELL PHONE, EVEN IF THE BATTERY IS DEAD, IF YOU HAVE IT PLUGGED INTO THE WALL!!!
During another scene, she screams when she gets frightened, letting her stalkers know exactly where she is. But all of a sudden, she gets concerned that the lamp in the room is on, which -- ZOMG! -- might alert her stalkers that she's in the room. Her solution? Try and turn the lamp off. That might be a good idea, if she weren't too fucking stupid to figure out which direction to turn the switch on the light. Failing at turning the lamp off the normal way, she resorts to BEATING THE LAMP ON THE GROUND, MAKING LOTS OF NOISE, AND COMPLETELY DEFEATING ANY CHANCE SHE MIGHT HAVE HAD OF NOT BEING DISCOVERED!
When James makes it home, the strangers disappear. Of course, he thinks she's gone crazy (CLICHE!!!) since there's no evidence, but when the phonograph turns itself on, he knows somebody's in the house. So he goes to his car to get his cell phone (since Kristen's has been thrown into the fire by a potential killer), and sees that his car's windows have all been beaten in. Nevermind the fact that the masked madmen managed to smash these windows without making any noise whatsoever. He already knows that Kristen's cell phone has been taken away from her by the killers. He can assume the same about his own. Yet he walks slowly to his car carrying a butcher knife and what does he find? Yep, his cell phone's gone. And now he's being attacked. So Kristen runs out to him. Why? Because the script told her to. They proceed to be attacked by the killers in a truck.
Here's another good one. They're face to face with one killer in the truck. They've got two directions they can run. They can bolt off into the very nearby woods which have trees so dense that no truck could ever possibly drive through them, or they can run back to the house. What do they do? Run back to the house. Why? I speculate they do this because the screenwriter wrote it that way. Do their survival instincts ever kick in?
No.
So now they're back in the house. This is James's father's summer home, so he says he knows where his father keeps a gun. He apparently doesn't because he scrambles to find it. He looks for a full-size shotgun behind books on a bookshelf with shelves so narrow that you could never fit a full-sized shotgun on them. He eventually finds it on top of the bookshelf, which makes more sense. They find some ammo in a shoebox in a bedroom closet. Why James's father would keep his firearms and his ammo in two completely separate locations is beyond me.
So they load up. Right as they're about to get to the two-inch-thick solid wood front door, an ax comes chopping through it effortlessly with one blow. Wait. That's not wood. That's styrofoam. Now there's a hole in the door big enough to see the killer's mask outside it. He shoots from a distance, but there's no way in hell that he could possibly hit the ax-wielder because it's a freaking scattergun aimed from twenty feet away from a hole the size of a human head. Instead of walking up to the hole and scaring the bejeezus out of their tormentor, then shooting, taking off half of that person's face, he shoots once from a distance, then runs the other direction - BACK INTO THE HOUSE!
He eventually makes his way outside after another dreadful period of silence and him killing his best friend (or maybe it's his brother, I can't tell because none of the characters have even that level of depth) on accident, he winds up hiding in the woods. He sees one of the killers and that killer doesn't see him. Instead of using that to his advantage and, I don't know, shooting her to death, he lets her find him, then gets his ass kicked and the shotgun taken away.
This leaves Kristen on her own. She runs out of the house, and falls into a ditch that wasn't there when James left the house. Her leg is hurt. Instead of crawling up and away from the house, since none of the killers know her whereabouts, she decides she's going to be stupid again and crawl back toward a barn which is right next to the house.
Allow me to describe this barn. It's very dark. The front door to the barn is very well lit. If somebody were to try to get in, Kristen would know immediately, and be able to do something about it. The other entrance is a window that's so high up and so small that it simply wouldn't be viable to enter through it, especially if you were trying to sneak up on a person. The barn is full of could-be weapons. You've got chainsaws and machetes and a place where an ax used to be, but truly, anything in this room could be used to do some serious damage to a person if thrown or swung. Instead of wielding any of these items, Kristen chooses to turn on an old amateur radio to call for help, as if anybody actually uses those anymore. That's why this piece of shit is IN THE BARN!!! Of course, talking over the radio alerts the killers to her whereabouts (she doesn't even learn from experience in this movie), and one of them swings an ax in through the high-up window, effectively scaring her and destroying the radio... but not much else. Like I said, that window is too high and too small to actually be a threat. But does Kristen keep her position in this safehouse? Hell, no! She runs back to the house which is huge, has multiple entrances that can't be watched all at once, and has been proven several times already to be a major danger zone.
She's very quiet in the house, and her leg (which keeps healing itself and then getting worse again as convenience allows) is all better for the time being. The result is that somehow the killers don't know where she is. One even walks into the room with her and walks straight past. She should grab the knife that's sitting on the counter nearby and stab the fucker in the back. But she doesn't. She hides in a closet.
You ever notice how all closets in horror movies have doors with slats in them? You ever notice how the victims can see out these slats perfectly well, but the killers can never see in? Same deal here. Though hiding in this closet isn't too bad an idea. You can see the killers when they walk in (and one does, and he walks in circles, sits down in an easy chair, then stands back up and does more circles for about five boring minutes), and there are most certainly no other entrances. Kristen's almost in control here. She should jump out and kill these masked freaks while she's got this opportunity to do so. It should be mentioned that NONE OF THEM ARE CURRENTLY ARMED!!! But she failed Kindergarten, so she doesn't do that.
So they get her and they get James (who's still alive) and they tie up the couple and stab them a bunch. There's this great, operatic scene where the killers remove their masks. But we still don't see their faces, so what's the point? Oh yeah. Running time.
I won't tell you how this ends, because you don't want to know. It's too insipid for words (though the screenwriter certainly put those words on paper at some point). What I will tell you is that you don't want to see this movie. Your intelligence, if you have any, will be insulted. I should also mention that the flick is full of inconsistencies, like the ditch that wasn't there before and the fact that, though Kristen cuts her hand really badly on a butcher knife early in the movie so that her hand is bleeding profusely for the following sixty minutes, there isn't any blood on the knife at any time until Kristen gets full-on stabbed by it. I can also tell you that the movie opens on some title cards followed by a 9-1-1 phone call recording of Kristen screaming and saying that there's blood everywhere and that she doesn't know where she is, but that scene is never in the movie because it couldn't have possibly happened because the phone lines are cut and all their cell phones have been destroyed.
I will also say that the movie doesn't trust its audience. It opens on title cards that explain the situation. And a voiceover reads it back to us in full. Thanks. I, unlike Kristen, got through the third grade. I can read just fine. In fact, if I could watch the French original that this movie is based on, I would watch them in French with English subtitles. I would read my way through that movie. Also, they set up this scene where, when we're first introduced to these two retards, Kristen is crying and James is disappointed. He takes her back to the summer home where she's shocked and a little guilt-ridden to find that he's really romanced the place up. There are candles everywhere, music ready to play on the record player, and rose petals all over the floor. He sets a ring box - the kind you get from the jewelry store - down on the table. I assumed, as I hope everyone in my theater did, that he had just proposed marriage to her and had been rejected. But that apparently wasn't enough. We need a series of two or three flashbacks to explain that to us in excruciating detail.
There's also this one scene, when the door is knocked on for the first time, where James says, "What time is it? Like, four o'clock?" Then we get a shot of a clock on the wall announcing the time as 4:05 AM. It's a small thing, but it's just another example of how this movie spells everything out for you and leaves absolutely nothing to your imagination except for how the characters got so stupid.
The killers' excuse for coming into the house and killing them comes in the last fifteen minutes of the movie and the last fifteen seconds of the trailer for the movie: "Because you were home." Let that be a metaphor for this movie as a whole. It doesn't make any more sense. I mean, sure, they were psychotic people with a penchant for murder, so they picked some random house and killed people in it. But it's supposed to be a catalyst for the entire ninety minutes and it just doesn't work. It might have worked if the killers had character depth. Look at The Devil's Rejects to see how a "just because" logic can work very well. I must say that I have not seen a movie this bad since I watched fifteen minutes of Norbit on a lunch break at work once.
Don't watch this. Please, for the love of God, don't watch this. Even when it's on HBO at midnight in a few months, don't watch this "because it was on."
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