Review: The Strangers Prey at Night

A family of four (Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson, and their two kids) head for a camping ground/caravan park where they are beset by creepy masked weirdos hanging about.

I didn’t take to the 2008 “The Strangers”, one of the worst horror films of the 00s. In my review I remarked:  ‘I’d argue that 90 minutes of a blank screen would be more eventful than this film.’. Harsh but true, although apparently most other people really liked the film. People other than me are weird, is the message we can take away from this. Anyway, good news, this 2018 sequel from director Johannes Roberts (“The Other Side of the Door”, “47 Metres Down”) and screenwriters Bryan Bertino (director of the original film) & Ben Ketai (co-writer of something called “Malevolent”) doesn’t suck quite as much. Yeah, still sucks. Sorry.

Like the first film, this one claims to be ‘Based on true events’ and like the first film, I’m very much calling bullshit on that. For starters, the first film didn’t have events. Not a goddamn thing happened for over an hour. Not much more happens in this one to be honest, and I still don’t understand the m.o. of the title characters. In fact, given the caravan park setting of this one, I think it makes even less sense. Add to that terribly unpleasant protagonists (When will Hollywood learn that Christina Hendricks’ screen presence is somewhere in between ‘Resting Bitch Face’ and ‘I really don’t want to be here at all’?) and a far too insistent music score by Adrian Johnston, and no I did not have a good time with this one. Oh, also the lighting scheme employed by Roberts and cinematographer Ryan Samul (“Mulberry Street”, the solid vampire flick “Stake Land”) can best be described as ‘Urinary Tract Infection’. Yeah.

I knew this wasn’t going to be much better than the previous film from the opening scene where nothing much is shown to happen yet it’s treated as a big deal. It’s like no one learned from the complete non-entity of the first film. In fairness to Roberts and Samul, I’ll admit that despite the yellow look there’s a couple of creepy visuals and some fog. Also, the one brain cell in the film’s script is having the brother character be believably scared without screaming like a baby so that his character progression when he toughens up a bit is more plausible (They manage to cock even that up by the film’s end, though). The rest is…nothing, although I must say I didn’t expect to hear Aussie band Mental As Anything’s 80s hit ‘Live it Up’ in an American horror film in the modern era. Points off for playing seemingly every other Kim Wilde hit aside from her one decent one (the cover of ‘You Keep Me Hangin’ On’).

It’s the same film but with caravans. If you liked the first film, you might like this. I hated the first film, and caravans or not, I only hated this slightly less. Roberts shows he knows how to hire a good cinematographer, but not much else.

Rating: D+