Verdict
Summary
This one has glaring flaws and stupid behavior and bad decisions made by the protagonists, but it delivers what you’d expect with not much impact, ending on a bit of a cliffhanger. I like Harlin as a filmmaker, but his best days as a genre specialist are long over, seeming to have lost his edge. His efficiency is on display here, but there’s no real style or distinction to it, but I suspect that fans of the other entries in this series aren’t going to mind much.
Plot:
A home invasion becomes a night of terror for a young couple waylaid in a small town.
Review:
While driving through a small town, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and her fiancé Jeff (Ryan Bown) stop at a cafe for a quick bite to eat, but when they return to their car, it’s just their luck (or fate) that the car won’t start. Since we’ve seen this sort of movie before, it appears obvious that they’ve been deliberately sabotaged, and the locals (all of whom seem suspiciously insidious) direct them to an available B&B house in the middle of the woods nearby. They’re dropped off at the single house in the middle of nowhere, and anyone with horror movie antennae knows that these two hapless people are going to have the worst night of their lives. Sure enough, a masked female creep shows up at the door, knocking loudly in the middle of the night (stranger danger!), and both Maya and Jeff have nowhere to go but insane. Jeff, being an idiot, takes the motorcycle parked on the side of the house back to town to retrieve his asthma inhaler (!) from their car at the mechanic shop while poor Maya is left to fend for herself as a total of three masked home invaders creep in towards her, terrorizing her until Jeff eventually shows back up. What follows is the standard stalk and slash formula, with the “strangers” seeming to be impervious to pain or a conscience as they intend on killing these two people just because “they’re home.”
Full disclosure: I absolutely hated the first Strangers movie, as I felt it had no purpose or point, delivering only terror with no reprieve or payoff, leaving the audience in a state of hopelessness and despair. The second movie was much better, feeling more in tune to the classic slashers where the characters actually had a fighting chance against the strangers, and the ending was satisfying. So I went into this one with some trepidation, and since I was aware that director Renny Harlin made three of these “chapters” back-to-back, I figured this first one was not going to be definitive and would merely set up more entries, and for that I was more or less correct. This one has glaring flaws and stupid behavior and bad decisions made by the protagonists, but it delivers what you’d expect with not much impact, ending on a bit of a cliffhanger. I like Harlin as a filmmaker, but his best days as a genre specialist are long over, seeming to have lost his edge. His efficiency is on display here, but there’s no real style or distinction to it, but I suspect that fans of the other entries in this series aren’t going to mind much.
Lionsgate’s Blu-ray / DVD / Digital Code combo pack for The Strangers: Chapter 1 comes with an audio commentary by star Petsch and producer Courtney Solomon, as well as a couple of bonus features including “Reimagining a Classic: Making The Strangers: Chapter 1,” “A Hostile Environment: The Visual Design of The Strangers: Chapter 1,” and the trailer.
