Director – Renny Harlin, Screenplay – Alan R. Cohen & Alan Freedland, Story – Bryan Bertino, Based on the Film The Strangers (2008) Written by Bryan Bertino, Producers – Alistair Burlingham, Mark Canton, Charlie Dombek, Christopher Milburn, Gary Raskin & Courtney Solomon, Photography – Jose David Montero, Music – Justin Burnett & Oscar Senen, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ben Burrell, Special Effects Supervisor – John Smith, Prosthetics Supervisor – Ionel Popa, Production Design – Adrian Curelea. Production Company – Sherborne Media/Lipsync/Richmond Pictures/Village Roadshow/Hasbula Productions/A.I.E./Elipsis Capital, S.L..
Cast
Madelaine Petsch (Maya), Froy Gutierrez (Ryan), Letizia Fabbri (Pin-Up Double), Matus Lakcak (Scarecrow Double), Olivia Kreutzova (Doll-Face Double), Ben Cartwright (Rudy), Emma Horvath (Shelly), Janis Ahern (Carol), Stevee Davis (Dougie), Ryan Bown (Jeff Morell), Rafaella Biscayne (Eden), Pablo Sandstrom (Neil), Richard Brake (Sheriff Rotter), Pedro Leandro (Deputy Walters)
Plot
Ryan and Maya are a couple driving through Oregon to take Maya to a job interview in Portland when they become lost. They stop in the small town of Venus to eat at the diner and ask directions but afterwards find that the vehicle will not start. They are forced to spend the night until a part can be picked up in the morning. They are taken to a remote cabin in the woods. As they settle in for the night, three strangers in masks proceed to invade the cabin and terrorise them.
The Strangers (2008) was one the sleeper hits of the late 2000s. It had considerably spooky effect as it depicted a Home Invasion by three sinister masked figures who terrorised a regular couple. It only did modestly in theatrical release but it gained a reputation for newcomer director Bryan Bertino, while the home invasion by masked strangers has become a surprisingly recurrent trope in other films. It led to one sequel with the forgettable The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018). The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the first in a reboot of the series that will retell the story through a three film arc. Bryan Bertino contributes the story for the new trilogy.
Renny Harlin is someone who should be on anybody’s list of bad directors. The Finnish born Harlin first appeared in the US with his third and fourth films, Prison (1987) and A Nightmare on Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1988), and then gained a modest degree of respectability with Die Hard 2 (1990), followed by a series of mindlessly spectacular action films like Cliffhanger (1993), CutThroat Island (1995), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and Driven (2001). Into the millennium, Harlin seemed to demonstrate a predilection for genre material with the likes of the ridiculously entertaining killer shark movie Deep Blue Sea (1999), the universally derided Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), the serial killer thriller Mindhunters (2004), the supernatural horror The Covenant (2006), the unsolved mystery The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013), The Legend of Hercules (2014) and the Wu XiaLegend of the Ancient Sword (2018). None of these are very good films.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 represents a comeback to the Hollywood mainstream for Renny Harlin at age 65, the point when most people are seeking retirement. Harlin is a director coasting by on a career that peaked thirty years ago around the time of Die Hard 2 and Cliffhanger. His career has looked no great shakes throughout the 2010s, having had to travel to Russia and China to shoot on production deals made there. You would have to go back to The Covenant in 2006 to find a Harlin film that entered the Top 10 charts at the US box-office. The Strangers: Chapter 1 is a comeback for Harlin if you can accept what in the days of the videostore store would have been no more than a direct-to-dvd release as a comeback.
Froy Gutierrez and Madelaine Petsch relax at the cabinThe Scarecrow and Pin-Up imprison Madelaine Petsch
I felt dubious about the idea of a reboot of The Strangers. The problem being that the first film has such a minimalist set-up that I was wondering how they were going to stretch it out to three films. In the original, there is no backstory or extraneous detail to the attack – we know almost nothing about the couple Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman and even less about the three invading masked psychos. There seems barely anything there to stretch the story out any further – indeed, when it came to the sequel they simply went with the same thing happening to a different family. The Strangers: Chapter 1 gives us the same three masked figures but a different couple and a more substantial backstory about their arrival in a
Sinister Small Town and being forced to spend the night in a cabin.
Thereafter, everything gets predictable. This is a film where you only need to have seen The Strangers, an infinitely superior film, to know everything that is going to happen. All the jumps and scares, the scenes of figures unexpectedly appearing behind people take place with a monotonous predictability. I reached the end of the film and realised there was not a single one of these jumps that stayed in memory for me to note down when it came to writing the film up.
Renny Harlin is a director incapable of creating a film that exists in any depth beyond exactly what is clearly and obviously happening on screen – his films operate on the level of cartoons for young children where everything that is happening has to be explained even to those who don’t get it, albeit with sensibilities for people around the 18-24 mindset. It feels only like professional duty that is going to make me have to endure two further films in the same vein as this.
