Review – The Strangers: Prey at Night

While watching The Strangers: Prey at Night, a woman behind me kept jumping and gasping at nearly every scene and at one point said to the person next to her, “I don’t want to watch this movie anymore.”  This essentially summarizes the feelings I had while watching the movie.  Only I wasn’t scared, I was bored and annoyed.

In this sequel that nobody asked for, a dysfunctional family spends the night in a secluded mobile home park when they are visited by three masked psychopaths who terrorize them throughout the night.

The Strangers (2008) is one of the scariest movie experiences I have ever had.  The movie is simple in it’s plot and doesn’t rely on cheap jump-scares to be scary, but on musicless, suspenseful scenes that always have us on the edge.  But the scariest part of the movie was the randomness of the events that take place.  The most infamous line from the film is when Liv Tyler’s character asks, “Why are you doing this?!”  And one of the psychopaths replies, “Because you were home.”  That line sends chills up my spine and really brought the movie home.  It added a level of realistic creepiness that something like this could happen to any person at any time.

But with The Stranger: Prey at Night, that randomness and that realism gets thrown out the window.  With this sequel, the three psychopaths don’t have nearly the effect that they had in the first one.  It seems they now plan out their killings rather than just show up.  As morbid as it sounds, that aspect of these killers was interesting to think about.

The psychopaths aren’t nearly the biggest issue with the film.  The reason why the psychopaths are the way that they are is because director Johannes Roberts has no idea what kind of movie he is making.  The first one was a small, contained thriller.  Roberts steers far away from the simplicity of the original, but with no actual direction.  With it’s neon-techno score and the slow zoom-heavy cinematography, the movie has the look of a schlocky, cheap 80’s horror movie, similar to that of a Friday the 13th sequel.  But Roberts doesn’t allow the fun of that genre to happen.  Nothing about this movie is fun.  I was awaiting bloody, gory, ridiculous deaths, but the deaths in the film are rather lame and rather bloodless, which, if you’re going to make a retro, schlock horror movie, humor me with the insane deaths.  And with no direction of genre and poor killing sequences comes no scares, which is a travesty, since the first one is genuinely horrifying.

What really ruined the movie was the characters because they are just the worst.  Not since the original Purge (2013) have I wanted a group of characters to die so badly in a movie.  In a way, I was rooting for the psychopaths to kill them all.  Everybody is a one-note cliché.  The daughter is a family nuisance who is headed off to boarding school, the son is “too cool” for the family, and the parents just let their kids talk back to them and do nothing to keep the family dynamic functional.  And the crazy thing is that they don’t change while being attacked.  They also apparently don’t know how to do anything quietly or subtly, which are two key things you want to have when you’re trying to get away from murderous psychopaths.  With their constant heavy breathing, crying, and incredibly loud break-ins, it’s no wonder the psychopaths kept finding them.  They could have been heard for miles down the road.  I was done with this family minute ten of the movie and was mad the psychopaths weren’t done with them faster.

I don’t know if there has ever been a sequel that made me like it’s first film less, but that is exactly what The Strangers: Prey at Night did.  Aside from the terrible characters, poor direction, and no scares, the movie ruins the sort of origin these psychopaths and eliminates the horror of the randomness of their acts of violence.  I usually watch The Strangers every Halloween, but this year, I might have to change that, as I don’t know if it will be scary anymore, all because of an unwanted sequel was made.  Tragic.

Did you see The Strangers: Prey at Night?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter and Instagram, @kevflix, or on Facebook by searching Kevflix.