It’s been a while since I did a movie review, so I thought I would review The Strangers, which I finally watched tonight. As with most of my reviews, there will be some spoilers, so keep that in mind if you haven’t watched the movie yet.
I had heard back when the movie was playing in theaters that it was a pretty good movie that was brought down by a poor ending, and I agree with that assessment. The Strangers seems to be one of those movies where the writers and director crafted an excellent movie for the most part, but couldn’t think of a good ending.
The first hour or so of the movie was quite good. The plot is actually very basic – a couple returns home after attending a wedding, and unknown masked assailants attack them. There is just enough time spent at the beginning of the movie developing the protagonists to make you care about them, but it didn’t take too long to get into the suspenseful part of the movie. Simple but effective plot devices, such as knocks at the door and an unknown person standing in the yard staring in the window, are used to create an atmosphere that is genuinely scary. I thought the skipping record on the record player while the villains searched the house for their victims was particularly effective. The masks worn by the villains were very creepy as well.
The first 15 minutes or so of the movie’s second hour felt like filler to me. It almost seemed like they made an hour-long movie that was really good, but realized it would have to be longer to see a theatrical release. The things that happened during this part of the movie were very run-of-the-mill horror movie cliches. The victim tries to run from the house to the barn, falls down and hurts her ankle, and has to crawl the rest of the way; the victim tries to call for help on an old radio but the villain smashes it; the victim hides in a closet while the villians walk around the house looking for her. This part of the movie almost became boring.
The ending of the movie was very basic. There wasn’t anything particularly creative about it, and there wasn’t any sort of revelation as to why the villains did what they did. They just tied the victims to chairs and stabbed them. When one of the victims asked why they were doing this, one of the villains simply replied “because you were home”.
There were several things that I didn’t like about the ending. First, the villains removed their masks and revealed their faces to their victims before stabbing them – but their faces were never shown on camera. This was a huge disappointment. Secondly, the very end of the movie just didn’t make sense to me. One of the victims was still alive – and the villains knew it. However, they willingly left her alive. I didn’t understand why they would do that, since they had shown their faces to her. Finally, the final scene was puzzling. Two kids entered the house and found the bodies of the victims who had been killed, as well as the surviving victim. One of the kids approached the survivor, she opened her eyes and screamed, and the credits rolled. I don’t know what that was supposed to represent, unless it was to show that she survived, but we already knew that.
As a new feature of my movie reviews, I’ve decided to end them not only by giving my rating of the movie, but also by picking three other movies from the same genre and telling whether I though they were better or worse than the movie I just reviewed.
The Strangers Rating: *** (Good)
Was it better than:
- The Halloween remake? YES
- Vacancy? NO
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre (original)? NO
