The Strangers 2008 review

There’s a remarkable scene in Halloween in which, instead of giving us another amped-up shock tactic, John Carpenter instead has his bogey materialize, slowly and intractably, out of the background shadows. Take that scene and repeat it, from every possible spatial permutation for about 90 minutes, and you have The Strangers, a movie that progresses through its gritty 70’s style horror platitudes with such cold efficiency that, afterwards, a brisk shower may be in order. It isn’t a bad movie per se, and since learning of its creator’s directorial nascence, one’s indignance towards it has abated somewhat. Nevertheless, The Strangers is yet another callous lesson in the existence of evil! without the style, artistry, acting, music, or political / sociological subtext to make it anything more than a kid picking the legs off a grasshopper. And you’re the grasshopper.

From the phoned-in verite of its Handicam laziness to the phoned-in discord of its characterizations, it just feels stale from the outset, as if Vacancy had somehow been pruned of its directorial precision and semiotic heft and then left out under the sun for a few days. It elicits groans with its very first frame, wherein it announces that ‘this is based on a true story!’ (it ain’t), a device that used to devilishly reconstitute the meaning of a film’s violence (see: the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Fargo), whereas now it just comes off as another of cinema’s tired attempts to legitimatize itself by being ‘real.’ Speaking of, one has to come back to that silly Handicam cinematography, which probably does the most to devalue the movie’s icy despair. That camera just keeps a’shake-shake-shakin’ at everything in sight, the end result being nothing beyond jittery eyeballs.

The current swing in horror feels reactionary to the goofy, overplotted messes of yesteryear (the Scream era, if you will), but it’s a flaky solution to start underplotting the genre into oblivion, such that we’re basically just watching nameless meat ground up in the machinations of doomed circumstance. This period is undeniably indebted to the howling madness of 70’s grindhouse (The Last House on the Left, et. al.), and sure, if you have the pebbles to attempt something of that brutality, then by all means. Conversely, what irks about stuff like The Strangers is that, underneath the superficial grit, they’re not at all on the same level: if anything, they’re trying to take the raw horror of grindhouse and make it potable for the mainstream, which continues to come off as misdirected at best, skeezy at worst. Particularly what bothers about The Strangers is how clearly it has taken the template of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (either version) and diluted it into a simplistic thriller built upon violence and antagonism, the very subject of Haneke’s barbed exegesis (whether it was a successful one or not).

Again, The Strangers isn’t entirely a failure, but it succeeds only within the cramped confines it has established for itself, and its final bleakness feels specious and entirely unearned (the “you were home” explanation all but lifted from Haneke’s B-sides). Granted, one has to admit a certain admiration for any horror movie that can get an opening-night audience to shut the fuck up: the first hour was filled with the expected chortles and gibbering; by the end, not a goddamn peep. Still, bullying an audience into silence only goes so far.

source:http://appreciatinggreattrash.com