If you thought that – somehow – Renny Harlin would improve his directing muscles with the second part of his planned The Stangers trilogy, with a month of additional photography to consider the (disastrous) audience feedback from The Strangers – Chapter 1, you would be wrong. I genuinely dislike being cynical or irate when discussing film.
However, the colossal waste of time of the trilogy (and by extension, franchise, which started with Bryan Bertino’s horrendous 2008 film, which, for some inexplicable reason, became a cult classic) is on full display in the embarrassingly terrible The Strangers – Chapter 2. It is a film that never justifies its raison d’être and stretches an already thin premise from the first chapter into near-interminable, incompetently crafted tedium.
Harlin became a household name in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with films such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, Cliffhanger, The Long Kiss Goodnight, and Deep Blue Sea. Yet, his reputation as a somewhat decent genre artist took a nosedive in the 2000s and 2010s, with a string of critical and commercial duds. Let’s not forget Cutthroat Island, whose troubled production became a notorious part of Hollywood history, alongside its disastrous reviews and box office performance. However, unlike some genre appreciators who recognize Harlin’s imprint within the industry, I’ve always found him to be a low-rent version of some of the best action and horror filmmakers working today.
Harlin’s movies possess no original bone in their body. He often copies from someone else, with no apparent shame. Each frame, no matter how well-crafted it can be, is a reference to another, better movie.
This is extremely apparent in The Strangers – Chapter 2, which begins within the hospital walls as Maya (Madelaine Petsch) recovers from the injuries she sustained in the first movie. In fact, she is the only survivor of the attack from a group of random strangers who stalked and violently murdered her fiancé simply because they were there.
That is the basis of Bryan Bertino’s original. Random strangers hunted and killed other people only because they were at a place they shouldn’t have been, at the wrong time. That’s what supposedly makes the film terrifying, though I’ve always found it profoundly exploitative and mean-spirited.
That said, the fact that the “strangers” seemingly have no motivation and prey upon innocent people because they are home is terrifying in and of itself. The commentary, as haphazardly executed in the film as it may be, is heard loud and clear. Harlin seemed to have followed that throughline for the first chapter of the trilogy, albeit unconvincingly.
Now, since this is Chapter 2, we need to pad the runtime, and screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland think audiences must sit through a horrendously written backstory involving Ema Horvath’s Shelly, a waitress at a local diner with a dark past.
Predictable, dull and unintentionally hilarious
Suffice to say, everything is telegraphed from the start, and the resulting dramatic turn that occurs near the end of the picture caused the few people in the auditorium to laugh uncontrollably. What Harlin shows on screen is incredibly distasteful. Yet, the way in which it is staged is so laughably inert that none of it is emotionally compelling or believable at all.
The employment of flashbacks also removes the emotional tension of previous Strangers movies, while also missing the point of Bertino’s original and Johannes Roberts’ superior—and more stylized—The Strangers: Prey at Night. The one “good” thing I can say about those sequences is that it doesn’t try to humanize the villains at the heart of the story, but Chapter 2 still completely misses why some audiences were drawn to the original film.
Back to the hospital, the bravura setpiece of the movie, where the strangers, who have now learned that Maya has not only survived the attack but is on the road to a complete recovery, attempt to finish the job. As elaborately staged as a one-take chase between Maya and the assailants may be, everything looks and feels like a carbon copy of Halloween II, both versions. There’s a more patient, tension-filled section that feels very much in line with Rick Rosenthal’s film, while the perversely violent second half is undoubtedly reminiscent of Rob Zombie’s remake, albeit without the visceral gore and aesthetic thrills that made it such a masterpiece.
Harlin is a filmmaker who possesses no aesthetic skills. This is apparent during the close confrontations between Maya and the strangers, so ridiculously edited and staged that it feels like something you’d see out of a bargain bin disposable horror picture, rather than something crafted for the big screen.
There’s very little tension apart from occasional flourishes that work in isolation, but cannot carry a whole movie, particularly when the dialogues uttered by competent actors outside of this project (Joplin Sibtain, among others) are so baffling they almost feel written by an alien who has recently learned the bare bones of the English language.
Though nothing, and I mean nothing, will prepare you for a sequence involving a rabid CGI animal attacking Maya. You will not, in a million years, guess what kind of animal it is. Once Harlin reveals it, the laughter emanating from the audience was so contagious that any subsequent emotional beat or attempt at character development fell pitifully flat.
The movie then concludes with another cliffhanger, followed by a post-credits trailer for Chapter 3. However, by that point, I had already checked out long before any of these appeared on screen. Perhaps it’s best not to release the last installment to avoid further embarrassment, though I’m somewhat morbidly curious to see how this ridiculously terrible trilogy, which will likely be remembered as one of the worst in the history of cinema (no hyperbole), will wrap up.
Petsch does try to give her all, but the material completely betrays her, and everything around her is so terrible that her performance, sadly, suffers as a result. She desperately needs to get out of this trilogy to avoid any further embarrassment, and before Harlin gets sent to director’s jail again. Cutthroat Island might have put a massive dent in his reputation, although external factors did not help him one bit, but The Strangers – Chapter 2 is hellbent on killing it.
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