The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)

½ star
Despicably pointless and stupid, The Strangers: Prey at Night is not only a complete rehash of the first movie, but it is a maddening decent into the absolute pits of horror screenwriting. The script features everything from moody teens to poor decision-making to ridiculous exhibitions of pop music, which are presented to us in a manner that suggests a complete ignorance of basic human behavior, both in front of and behind the camera. That this mess was directed by Johannes Roberts, who made the superior 47 Meters Down, is mystifying. Perhaps the real culprit here is co-writer Bryan Bertino, the writer and director of the original. His narrative structure and idiotic plotting indicate that he simply had no more good or creative ideas for telling this story yet proceeded anyway due to the low budget and high likelihood for profit.

Parents Mike (Martin Henderson) and Cindy (Christina Hendricks) take their son Luke (Lewis Pullman) and daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) to an inexplicably abandoned trailer park owned by extended family members to spend some quality time together before shipping Kinsey off to boarding school. When they arrive, they grab the keys and head to their trailer. Luke and Kinsey head out for a walk and discover their aunt and uncle have been killed. They run back to tell mom and dad, and what follows is a frantic cat-and-mouse game between the family and three masked killers, presumably the same ones from the first movie. What also follows is one preposterous set piece after another, causing the movie to grow more absurd with each passing minute.

The complete lack of tension stems from the movie’s predictability. Take the scene in which Luke and Kinsey hear a noise behind a bedroom door in their aunt and uncle’s trailer. We know it’s the dog. We saw it earlier. The dog bumps around but doesn’t bark despite being trapped in a room for 24 hours and within earshot of Luke and Kinsey having a conversation. That’s how the movie sets up its scare scenes. They open the door and the dog jumps out. Elsewhere, the camera movements invite us to guess when a masked killer will appear by showing a space then moving away from it before panning back. We get a few false alarms, but it's a cheap way of creating suspense. Oh, and don’t even get me started on Luke’s failure to shoot one of the killers at point blank range when he had the chance. Now, there is the excuse that shooting someone and taking a life, even in self-defense, is a difficult thing to do. I get it, and I've even accepted it in better movies. Here’s the issue. Luke’s character is not sufficiently developed in any way that would allow us to examine his actions. He is a character designed to suffer. We are not meant to understand him.

As I watched these dimwitted characters run around, I was never clear on the setting. Since there are no other residents to be found in this trailer park, one must assume this is a vacation spot, though not a very nice one. Was it closed for the season? The weather suggests a summer season, so the empty trailer park doesn’t make any sense, other than to remove any possibility for help. The soundtrack doesn’t make sense either, except to present an opportunity for a few catchy ‘80s songs (like “Total Eclipse of the Heart”) to act as a backdrop to the carnage. The masked killers, who are as mindless as the heroes, see themselves as invincible, which is obvious when they stand still when directly threatened. The leader, a man in a mask, even stares viciously as Kinsey sets his truck on fire. This is done solely to make the villains seem scarier, but it’s flawed since the movie asks us to accept that they are willing to put their own lives at risk based on a hunch that their victims are incapable of fighting back. It’s all ludicrous, since the movie gives us no reason to think the killers would set aside any sense of self-preservation just to intimidate their prey.

The Strangers: Prey at Night isn’t scary, entertaining or thrilling. The first film, which took place inside a house, had some value to it. Its limited setting allowed for suspense to build. Ultimately it wasn’t that good, but it earned recognition for trying. This sequel, on the other hand, is just lazy. There are a few jump scares that work, which doesn’t really say much. Like the saying about the broken clock, it’s just inevitable that such scares will occasionally work. I did like the nod towards The Texas Chainsaw Massacre near the end, but these are isolated clouds in a vast and torturous desert.

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