In spite of its misleading title, The Strangers: Chapter 2 is actually the fourth film in the once-frightening franchise. The second installment of Renny Harlin’s no-one-asked-for-this series reboot, Chapter 2 is an improvement over last year’s Chapter 1 insomuch as hot water is an improvement over cold soup. It doesn’t matter how bland it tastes, so long as the temperature’s right.
Chapter 2 Continues a Pointless Storyline
Chapter 2 picks up immediately where Chapter 1 left off, and if you (like the half dozen or so people who saw it) forget what happened, it was just The Strangers all over again. Bryan Bertino’s 2008 chiller starred Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple beset by relationship difficulties on the same eve they’re stalked by a group of mask-wearing slashers who have no motive for their terror other than “because you were home.” It’s a lean and mean scare machine, a taut 80-something minutes punctuated by an admirable degree of nihilism and a terrific soundtrack. A 2017 trailer-park-set sequel, The Strangers: Prey At Night, is a gory good time even if it doesn’t capture the simplicity or terror of the original.
And now we have Harlin’s rebooted trilogy (a third is on the way at some point), a series which, on its admittedly incomplete basis, has tossed its hat into the ring for the most pointless movies ever made. Harlin was once the hotshot director of such flashy blockbusters as Die Hard 2 (1990), Cliffhanger (1993), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), and Deep Blue Sea (1999). He also directed the infamous bomb Cutthroat Island (1995) and, more recently, a bunch of anonymous foreign tentpoles, so one need not wonder too much why Harlin is now doing bargain-rate horror sequels.
Reshoots Intended to Improve Film May Have Hurt It
The Strangers: Chapter 2 is a weird movie, and not just because it’s the middle portion of a trilogy with less forward momentum than a stationary bicycle. Even after much-publicized reshoots, which retooled this installment and the next based on fan criticism of the first, Chapter 2 falls betwixt and between two stalls of franchise filmmaking, neither of which works. Harlin told The Hollywood Reporter that he excised flashbacks which over-explained the mythos of the Strangers, and perhaps he did excise some of them. But the finished movie still contains way too many flashbacks, all of which manage to unravel the scariness of the concept.
The post-production shuffling has the odd effect of pleasing no one, because just enough of the plot has been trimmed that it makes no sense, and yet the problematic pieces of the puzzle are still there, wedged into a corner space that cannot accommodate them. The editing and pacing are so inconsistent, and so reliant on material no longer in the film, that the feature occasionally feels like a collection of raw footage yet to be properly assembled.
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Much like the recent I Know What You Did Last Summerreboot andThe Conjuring: Last Rites, The Strangers: Chapter 2 tries to create its own universe by expanding on bite-sized pieces of lore from the past movies. This must be one of the most misguided fads in recent memory. As much as one might have an appreciation for the lo-fi thrills of the original, was anyone dying to know exactly who the elusive Tamara was or why the Strangers are going door to door asking for her?
But here’s the rub: compared to Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is practically a classic. It’s still as insipid as can be, with even less plot than its predecessor, but the protracted chase sequence which comprises the long-feeling 98-minute runtime is occasionally well-staged and holds a trio of effective scares. (That’s roughly one every 30 minutes—still a pretty bad average, but better than the previous film’s one.) Harlin gets a few points for mixing up the narrative as much as convention will allow. The best sequence, and also the one that could’ve been cut without affecting the narrative one bit, involves the heroine (Madelaine Petsch) fending off a hungry boar whilst trying to elude her tormentors in the woods of Oregon (really, Slovakia). It’s a knowingly bonkers scene which throws something genuinely unexpected, if deeply silly, into the works. That the film immediately returns to its bland pursuits is entirely expected, but still unfortunate.
