Strangers: Prey at Night- Movie Review

Ten years ago when I was a wild and wayward child, I convinced my father to go to a slasher movie with me. I was 18, he was tremendously bored, and so we wound up watching a story about Liv Tyler running away from a man with a bag on his head for almost two hours. I like to think it was a post-op Steven Tyler under that burlap, I'd certainly run from that plastic cast of a face any day of the week, but in reality it was probably someone else. Yet I dared to dream and it brought fresh enjoyment even as my father spent the entire car ride home eviscerating the victims in the movie for their stupidity (they didn't do too well in a panic) and their wanton inability to exercise even basic gun safety etiquette (at one point they accidentally shoot their friend in the face), and I was forced to come to terms with the fact that he was right. As fun as the movie was, these were not intelligent people. 

Thank god I didn't drag him to the sequel. I've flirted with being disowned one too many times already.

I've been to a lot of movies and so very many have been of the horror variety as I do love a good fear-based adrenaline rush, so I know well enough the tropes and traits that make such movies tick along. Eight times out of ten, people aren't even people so much as they are 'cannon fodder' and they'll usually make the sorts of decisions that drop them right in the laps of a variety of who's-who masked murderer aficionados. That's just how it is. Generally, all a horror movie victim must do to do their job right is run, scream, look scared and shout random one-liners, and at least make it look like they're not intentionally running to their deaths. Alas, no one told the cast and crew of Strangers 2 this valuable factoid and so I'm driven to my computer in retaliation.

I have never in my life seen people who deserved to die more than this family of four. From the father who whimpered at literally everything to his son who (playing a seventeen year old) looked to be about thirty-five, to the mother and her overacting and over-emoting daughter, we're treated to hijinks the likes of which I've never really seen before. The teens find the mauled and massacred remains of their aunt and uncle, two old fogies who are so beaten that their jaws are hanging off every which way and I'm pretty sure they don't have eyes anymore, and they race back through the empty trailer park (the conceit of the picture) and tell their parents "They're bleeding and cut. I don't know if they're alive." Naturally, father and son split up and leave their much loved lady family alone, because splitting up is always the right decision when a mass of masked murderers might be running around with facial wear that somehow never obstructs their peripheral vision.

Note: Guys. If you see two people tied together and so horrifically brutalized that they no longer have faces, you can just say they're dead. No one's going to blame you. Uncle Boffo isn't going to haunt you for not fishing through the remnants of his dangling jaw for a pulse. 

Then the hilarity ensues. People die and cry a lot, there are so many tears someone must've had a water bottle on site for either spritzing or replenishing lost fluids, people arm themselves only to randomly lose guns at the drop of multiple hats, I can't stress enough how stupid that part is, and then in one of my favorite scenes, Father is plugging along with his 470 year old vampire son in a van as they hunt for Probably Dead Daughter only to have one of their pursuers throw a rock at their windshield. At this point, the panicked duo that is armed with a handgun and driving a motor vehicle (with brakes) decides that their only recourse is to drive off the road by about a thousand feet and crash into a trailer house, the lone obstruction in an otherwise empty lot.

More tears follow this bit of crash test dummy panache, including a truly hilarious death, and we're off and running again. And so it goes. Over. And over. And over again. In truth, it began to seem timeless. I think, in those moments, I was so busy throwing my arms up in the air and throwing my head back in irritation that I became one with the universe. That's the only explanation I can think of, anyway. It's the only way it makes sense that somehow I sat through a 75 minute movie so poorly written and conceived that it felt like a lost lifetime in some dreadful pocket universe where a girl fleeing for her life is flummoxed by a six foot tall chain-link fence.

Sure, the knife-wielding lunatic is right behind you but don't let that rush those survival instincts of yours. Your brother, who's probably secretly your dad's brother, is undoubtedly running around trying to find golf clubs after inexplicably losing a gun in a life or death situation, so in terms of 'embarrassing' you're actually right on track to keep pace with that brilliant family of yours.

As the movie wound down, all I could hear was Darwin's voice calling down from the heavens: "Hark! Perhaps they deserve to die!"  he said.

In another world that was populated by better screenwriters, perhaps he would've been wrong and a theatrical visit wouldn't have been wasted. Sadly that's just the delusion of ten wasted dollars talking, the very same delusion that whispered "Hey! This might be a good movie." in my ear on a cold Wednesday evening. Instead, I was confronted outside the theater by the more real world voice of the only friend I'd found who was willing to see this magic of cinematic quality and his words stuck with me far longer than the perils of a family that, for the good of the gene pool, should probably pick up a box of Tide Pods on their way home. 

"Maybe they made it that bad on purpose," he said.

I don't think so, Mike. Far more terrifying than any event in that slog of a movie is this simple fact: They probably thought they'd made something to be proud of, proving once and for all that yes, some dreams are stupid.

"Strangers: Prey at Night" is one of those dreams.