When The Strangers: Chapter 1 was released, audiences had a sinking feeling. Not only was the completely unnecessary remake of Bryan Bertino’s 2008 home invasion masterpiece, The Strangers, just plain awful, it was also the first installment of a planned trilogy. Worse, the following chapters had already been scripted and filmed, with the whole endeavor basically a single six-hour movie.
Armed – or rather, burdened – with this knowledge, audiences were left wondering, how bad could it get? The depressing answer is The Strangers – Chapter 2, a middle segment that makes the promised conclusion seem like a threat.
The core problem is the very existence of the script by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, which begins from the misguided belief that the audience needs to know the motivations for the iconic trio of masked and anonymous killers. That’s exactly the opposite of Bertino’s original, where their chilling justification to their victims – “because you were home” – is what made the film so devastating. Here, Cohen and Freedland cobble together a still-incoherent mish-mash of ghost stories, urban legends, slasher tropes, and straight theft from the far-superior Halloween 2. Yes, when Halloween 2 is a better sequel, there’s little good to be said.
There is one moment of relief. Maya (Petsch), who survived the home invasion of the first film, spends 20 minutes being chased around the forest by a giant CGI hog. Why? Why not! At least you’ll have the brief joy of pretending that you’re watching an unlicensed Razorback remake, or maybe Hogzilla 2, because that’s the only entertainment to be had. Make no mistake, it’s horrible and a damning sign about the talents of former visual genius cinematographer turned director Renny Harlin. He used to know how to create character-driven high-stakes action in flicks like Die Hard 2, but this scene isn’t just half-baked – it’s a collapsed soufflé, dull and airless. It’s not even like DVD rental classic Deep Blue Sea, where Harlin seemed to accidentally back into a fun creature feature.
It does, however, provide a brief respite from the utter pointlessness of the main story. The first chapter misguidedly crammed some hints of a backstory into Bertino’s lean tale of amorality. Yet instead of leaning into his popcorn version of Funny Games, The Strangers – Chapter 2 lumbers after the later Friday the 13th films at that point when they decided that what their merciless killer needed was druids and Celtic mythology. Having survived the home invasion that took her fiancé (Gutierrez, present in hallucinations and flashbacks), Maya is taken to the emptiest but best-equipped rural hospital in Oregon. Seriously, there are more bodies in the morgue than there are patients in bed, but this setting provides seemingly endless empty corridors for Maya to run down as she is chased by the masked trio of the Scarecrow, Dollface, and the Pin-up Girl, their names derived from their simple store-bought Halloween masks. Then she runs through the woods. Then back to the crime scene from the first film. Then to her sister’s. At no point in this race does she do anything sensible like call the police, or even keep hold of the weapons she occasionally acquires. She does climb into a dumbwaiter, which seems like the perfect way to get killed by determined maniacs – but no such luck.
Petsch is given little to do but scream and limp, neither of which she does convincingly. Meanwhile the invaders get all the effort at character development, which is exactly what this film doesn’t need. Cardboard-thin secondary characters turn up as red herrings only to be quickly filleted, and Richard Brake returns as the local sheriff that’s impossible to trust because it’s Richard Brake, the greatest of modern sinister character actors. The story is both simplistic and telegraphed, which is handy because some startlingly inept filmmaking makes the action almost impossible to follow. There are multiple sequences that make no sense to the eye or brain, and basic design and costume decisions that make it nearly impossible to tell characters apart from each other. The only true horror here is that there’s another couple of hours of this still to come.