the blog of nathan loding

The Strangers (2008)
Star­ring: Scott Speed­man, Liv Tyler
Directed by: Bryan Bertino
Writ­ten by: Bryan Bertino
Rated: R
Rat­ing: 1/2 (half star out of five)

A young cou­ple who are hav­ing tem­po­rary rela­tion­ship issues return home after a friends wed­ding. They are then ter­ror­ized by three peo­ple in masks, who haunt their every turn until the end­ing we pretty much saw com­ing before we bought the tickets.

To quote Roger Ebert in his review of this movie: “What a waste of a per­fectly good first act! And what a mad­den­ing, nihilis­tic, infu­ri­at­ing end­ing!” He then describes how he read an inter­view with the direc­tor who said it was his first direc­to­r­ial job ever. This prompted Ebert to bump his review up 1/2 a star because he felt the direc­tor at least had the “chops” to make a movie. I disagree.

There was noth­ing orig­i­nal about this movie; there was noth­ing that I hadn’t seen before in another film that did it one-hundred times bet­ter. I hate to say it, but I was bored. First, let me pick apart the bulk of the film.

Funny Games (the orig­i­nal in 1997, not the remake) was bril­liant, in my opin­ion. Dar­ing, orig­i­nal, and truly fright­en­ing. Except for the quirky twist dur­ing the cli­max, the film was star­tlingly real­is­tic — there were no scenes of peo­ple behind you with a knife one sec­ond and the next they are gone. If those bad guys were behind you with a knife, you were going down.

Where The Strangers fails is it’s attempt to scare the audi­ence instead of it’s on-screen vic­tims. While get­ting a movie-goers pulse pound­ing is impor­tant, theres a cer­tain sweat that grows when you know what you’re wit­ness­ing before you is real, it’s pos­si­ble. This one wasn’t. While some shots were sim­ply creepy (namely the first time we see the masked male when our “hero­ine” is in the kitchen), they quickly loose their appeal. There’s one scene where Liv Tyler is crawl­ing on the ground and for a split-second, there’s a men­ac­ing fig­ure with a knife behind her, then it’s gone — and Tyler doesn’t even see it. It’s a scare for us, not for the char­ac­ter, which ren­ders the scare pointless.

I wanted to say that the begin­ning of the film was good, with some decent build­ing of sus­pense and drama. Unfor­tu­nately, the film­mak­ers had to ruin it with a ter­ri­ble voice-over and awful, just plain awful, cap­tions telling us this story is sup­pos­edly “based on true events.” Had the film­mak­ers started the the movie with Tyler and Speed­man dri­ving home from the wed­ding, the first act would have been fan­tas­tic (hence Ebert’s comments).

I never expected the end of it to be any­thing less than mediocre at best. Instead, they went for three or four cheap, cop-out moments that either make the audi­ence scream or go “Oh, how dumb.” Most said the latter.

The only scares this movie has to offer are a few creepy moments at the begin­ning, and then a bunch of extremely loud crash­ing noises that would make any­one jump in their seats. And, as hor­ror fans know, those don’t count as true scares. It’s mediocre at best, ter­ri­ble at it’s worst. Bor­ing overall.