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Here's the perfect opportunity for you to watch a downward spiral literally take place before your eyes as you watch a movie. During its first third, The Strangers starts out as a disturbingly creepy thriller that effectively keeps you on the edge of your seat and wisely realizes that a simple white mask on a human figure can be far more horrifying than the supernatural beings that often terrorize characters in horror films. These are all things that you can notice in the trailer of The Strangers, which is why I was very excited about this movie. I'm still waiting for the day when we'll get a truly haunting horror film that gets under my skin and keeps me from getting sleep at night. The only "recent" film that has come very close to that is The Blair Witch Project... but that was almost ten years ago.
So, The Strangers starts out with a great deal of potential to become that horror film I've been waiting for for so long. Unfortunately, something happens somewhere in the middle (before the middle, really) of this film that throws all that potential out the window. The Strangers becomes boring. The knocks on the doors become repetitive. Watching Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman run around scared and confused gets old. We're given nothing to separate what happens here from material we've seen in other films of the genre. When a third person (a friend to the characters played by Tyler and Speedman) arrives at the house, you'll probably be aware of his fate the very second he shows up on screen. Eventually, there comes a point that Speedman's character leaves the stage for a while, leaving Tyler's character to run around alone, trying to make radio contact with the police and hiding in the bushes from the villains who are haunting her... this is all fine and well, except that it is SUCH an extended sequence. It makes you want to say "Okay, will she stop playing around with the radio already? Is her boyfriend gonna show up anytime soon or did he just vanish into thin air?" The only good thing about this unnecessarily long sequence is that it ends with a very tense moment involving a closet, but it's unfortunate that they didn't do a very good job in the editing room with what comes before that moment.
What is most unforgivable about The Strangers, though, is the end. I don't have a problem with the fact that it doesn't have a happy ending. And that's not a spoiler because there's several things that point to the fact that the couple isn't gonna make it through the night. But that's not what's bad about it. What's bad about the ending is the incredibly lame way the filmmakers go about it. This is a film that apparently wanted to focus on the mounting tension and on highlighting suspense over gore, and all of a sudden, we are cheated at the end, by losing any and all tension and going strictly for conventional, distasteful gore. Nothing new or that you haven't seen before here. To make matters even worse, the very final shot of the movie involves one of those typical instances in which a character all of a sudden wakes up from the dead and lunges, for a final lame attempt at a "boo!" moment.
In a lot of ways, this film echoes last year's Vacancy; it starts out with a couple that is already dealing with some sort of emotional tension and negativity (which is a nice way to set up a film of this nature), and then proceeds to focus on the added tension that enters their lives once they start being haunted. The difference is that Vacancy, despite its lack of many surprises, keeps the rate of suspense up right until the ending, which needless to say is far better than that of The Strangers. Vacancy ends on an uncertain note, with the tension still high, whereas The Strangers unfolds kind of a like a deflating balloon. Tyler and Speedman do nothing to differentiate themselves from the dimwitted characters who usually populate horror films. I don't know if that is due to a lack of talent or to the fact that the script doesn't give them much to work with, but their lack of effectiveness certainly doesn't help this initially creepy, but ultimately unimpressive entry into the horror genre.
4/10
