The title of this movie bothers me on a grammatical level. The Strangers: Prey at Night works well enough with the colon, but it also works without the colon as well and that keeps sticking in my mind. The Strangers Prey at Night is a declarative statement, as well as sounding like a Giallo title akin to Don't Torture a Duckling or The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears. It just sticks out to me and acts as a minor distraction while I'm watching the film or writing this review.
Parents Cindy and Mike are driving their daughter Kinsey to her new boarding school (that she's being packed off to for alleged teenage delinquency, although we see very little of it in her behaviour) and their teenage son Luke is with them as well. The journey is long enough that they need to make an overnight stop, and so have arranged to spend the night in a trailer park owned by Cindy's uncle Marvin. Unbeknownst to them, however, three masked thrill killers have arrived at the trailer park before them and murdered Marvin and his wife, and when they discover that another family will be staying there, they decide to stick around as well to stalk, torture and eventually kill them as well. This borderline dysfunctional family will have to pull together to survive the night and stop these masked strangers from claiming any more victims.
The Strangers: Prey at Night has a brilliant soundtrack. Kids in America, Total Eclipse of the Heart, Making Love Out of Nothing at All... so many rocking 80s pop hits, usually played over scenes that really worked well with the music. That is until they'd cut or fade the music out for some traditional orchestra tension stings and I'd find myself thinking, "No! Bring the 80s music back! I was enjoying that!" And herein lies the problem: I enjoyed the soundtrack far more than the movie itself. Oh dear.
If you think back to my review of the previous movie to this, The Strangers, you'll remember how I lavished it with praise because of the way it slowly built up tension, kept the gore to a minimum and used a single house to great and claustrophobic effect. Well, this sequel has a whole trailer park for everyone to run around in, complete with multiple trailers and even a swimming pool, has a body count by about the 30-40 minute mark and barely has any of the stalking and game-playing that the killers did in the first movie to mentally torture their victims and crank up the psychological horror aspect of the film to 11. It has become, in effect, a generic slasher horror film, and after waiting ten years for this sequel that's one hell of a disappointment. Don't get me wrong, I like a good slasher film as much as the next horror reviewer... but these movies were never supposed to be generic slashers. They were supposed to be about the terror of being home alone and not knowing what was going on, while masked figures slowly taunted you before building up to a horrible climax.
There's a couple of good set pieces in the film, all set to 80s music like I said above. There's a certain dark beauty to watching someone gets stabbed while Making Love Out of Nothing at All fills the soundtrack, or someone struggling to stay afloat in a swimming pool while Total Eclipse of the Heart plays (and goes muffled every time we go underwater). But the film has traded in the terror for these set pieces, and I really don't think it was worth it. There's also a bit at the end that's clearly "homaging" the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre... which only serves to remind us again of films that managed to do the unrelenting terror thing without resorting to excess gore. And I'm not even going to go into the behaviour of our masked killers, who've apparently been getting away with this for ten years now despite taking no forensic countermeasures and never once coming across someone who takes Castle Doctrine seriously. And finally, as perhaps a final insult to our intelligence, the film attempts to give us one final scare with a "Is it really over?" style ending, when it was made abundantly clear that yes, it was over.
The hype machine strikes again, I suppose. After waiting ten years for this sequel it was going to have to have been pretty spectacular to live up to our expectations, and as we all know from bitter experience, the bigger the hype, the higher the chance of disappointment. But hey, at least I can still enjoy the soundtrack.
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