Rant - The Strangers

The Strangers is a horror movie that’s recently come to DVD in Australia. Starring Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler with Brian Bertino who’s previous work (according to IMDb) includes Gaffer and Smoking Guy in Xtracurricular.

This is the type of horror flick your English and Cultural Studies teachers warned you about. It’s bad. Bad with no compensating factors. The soundtrack feels like Scary Movie without the rock singles. Liv Tyler gives a great performance that only draws attention to Scott Speedman’s trademark horrible performance. The ending is a cockslap of ‘it was all a dream’ proportions. The victims are idiots and the villains are evil.

I might want to watch this movie again without my grumpy-pants and detective/thriller-hat on just to see if the bile settles, but this seems like it was designed to annoy people like me who were there for the plot. It’s a story about some psychos who kill some people. I probably should have called *Spoilers* there as that is seriously the entire movie. There are no plot twists. No big reveals. No motives for the killers, ulterior or otherwise. The victims are given a brief but ultimately unnecessary backstory. It does a lot of apparent foregrounding that goes nowhere, and there are subtleties between the lines that have no trade-off. It’s essentially a shit idea, poorly executed.

If you’re into horror for horror’s sake this could make for an ok night in, but the enjoyable part of horror for me is picking apart the story. A horror technique I love is when a story misdirects its audience; making me predict one ending with absolute certainty then turning it on its head. Admittedly, The Strangers did this but it doesn’t really pull it off, it just drops a clichéd ending for a completely unsatisfying one. About halfway through there’s a turning point that almost crosses into intriguing psychological thriller territory, but the movie seems to realise this and throws its arms up, runs in the opposite direction, and eats some shit.

If nothing else, The Strangers is an ambitious film, because it’s trying to scare the audience without just using gore and shock tactics. Unfortunately it still falls short here because the protagonists are impossible to empathise with and the killers are hard to take seriously. Keeping the killers motives in the dark can make them more terrifying, but it’s a tricky thing to do well. Here they just make me want to shake my fist and yell “get off my lawn you cheeky kids!”

I’ve heard it argued that this type of movie could inspire people to become psycho killers because it makes it look easy, but I’d be more inclined to think it’d inspire established psycho killers to go out and get their dignity back.