The second installment in the three-part reboot of The Strangers franchise has arrived.
While there are still a myriad of questions – Why do we now have four installments of this? Why are we all still watching? – we finally do get some hard-earned answers, too. And no, this is not in reference to the fact that the film dives into the masked killers’ backstory and their motivations, basically undermining the chilling effect of Bryan Bertino’s 2008 original, where the murders were random.
In fact, this new reboot, which started last year, also keeps mentioning the high statistics for random violent crimes, so none of this makes any sense, really. And maybe it shouldn’t, since this second outing, which is supposed to set up part three, finally reveals the horror trope this reboot is primarily focusing on. It's the terror felt by a director who realizes there’s no plot or characters for them to work with, and has to fight against the odds of truly horrific material.
Renny Harlin, who directed all three installments of this new The Strangers franchise, is a polarizing figure who worked with all kinds of stories before, directing some really bad movies in the process – but also some great ones, including Die Hard 2, which remains one of the best Christmas extravaganzas ever. Thus, being acquainted with Harlin’s filmography made the viewing of last year’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 peculiar. It did include a lot of clearly unintended hilarity, but also a great deal of admiration for the director who managed to squeeze not one but two suspenseful sequences out of the episodes where characters order food.
The whole thing was undoubtedly not great, but also doubly admirable, since it basically repeated Bertino’s film with just a few additions and changes, like turning an unhappy couple on the verge of a breakup into a happy one, celebrating their anniversary. The Strangers: Chapter 2 is finally allowed to venture into a new territory, and it kicks this off by copying the premise of Halloween 2. Picking up immediately after the events of the previous film, the survivor, Maya (Madelaine Petsch), is transported to the hospital, where she is harassed by the nightmares and the masked killers who soon come for her.
The film then exchanges the memories of the 1981 slasher classic for some more modern examples of the survival horror genre, when Maya has to run and hide in the woods, giving Harlin some much-needed creative leverage to come up with remotely interesting visuals. Petsch’s performance is also an improvement in comparison to the first film, since she now has something to do and show beyond a look of vague surprise at the fact that she and her boyfriend are being attacked at a cabin in the woods in the middle of nowhere (do these people not watch any movies ever?).
A badly CGI-ed wild boar then appears out of the trees to harass poor Maya some more, and leaves us with one last question: what can the third film possibly come up with to make us even more horrified by the misuse of Harlin’s abilities?
The film opens Friday, September 26, only in movie theates, via Lionsgate. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.