People Are Strange

Year: 2008

Director: Bryan Bertino

Cast: Scott Speedman, Liv Tyler, Gemma Ward

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I consider myself a wee bit of a horror expert, but one of my hugest blind spots has definitely been The Strangers, the 2008 home invasion film that was almost immediately minted as a modern classic. Now, I'm not here to strip it of that status, which it rightfully earned, but the reason I've been avoiding it for ten years is pretty similar to the reason I didn't love it as I watched it in prep for the sequel.

I don't need anything distracting Dennis from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The Strangers is about a couple: James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristin McKay (Liv Tyler). Their suffering begins long before the horror plot kicks in, because she has just refused his proposal at a friend's wedding reception (way to steal the thunder, my dude). They continue their planned trip to his family's summer house, but there's an icy rift between them that prevents them from talking in anything above a forlorn whisper.

Their night is interrupted seemingly innocuously when, in the middle of the night, an unseen girl knocks on their door, asking for Tamara. They turn her away, but when James is on a cigarette run the girl returns. It soon becomes evident that she's not alone, because she is one of a trio of masked strangers who have come to murder the crap out of this couple. Thus begins a Long Night of the Soulless, where James and Kristin struggle to survive in any way they can.

Those ways mostly involve walking veeeeeery slooooowly down hallways.

I do admire The Strangers for its bold formal choice at the beginning, pulling a Texas Chain Saw Massacre with a gravelly opening monologue about how this movie is "based on true events" that "totally happened, we promise." That's a fun move that shows how it's in touch with its horror predecessors, but it's probably the only thing about the movie that could be called fun.

Not that that's a problem. The bleak register The Strangers operates in has been a boon to many a classic chiller, but in my mind they work a little better when the movies are a little better. The Strangers has plenty of elements that really work, which we'll go into in a minute, but the pacing has some serious problems. And that's pretty shocking considering that, when all is said and done, by the time the super slow, feature-film-run-time-reaching credits roll, only one hour and seventeen minutes have elapsed.

For one thing, I just scrolled up to check something in the first paragraph and I thought I'd accidentally embedded the same screenshot twice in a row. Nope, those are two different scenes about thirty minutes apart, which should tell you just how committed to repetition this movie is: walk down a hall, hide in a small space, leave the small space, return to the small space, find a new small space, lather with blood, rinse, repeat. I understands the constraints of the low budget horror world, but the movie doesn't utilize the space for anything other than slow stalker shots of people who really should know to look behind them at least once every five minutes or so.

Also, the grainy handheld aesthetic the film uses just hasn't aged particularly well, but that's not entirely its fault, so I won't dwell on that one. And I hate to say it, because she does do well in the terror scenes, which are really the most important, but anytime Liv Tyler has a line of dialogue, it's delivered in a breathy whisper like she's in a hypnotic trance. Most of the movie isn't dialogue-driven, thankfully, but that vacant Marilyn Monroe burble drags you out of the movie like an electromagnet.

I wanna be stabbed by you, just you, and nobody else but you.

But all that aside, The Strangers is still spooky as heck. Home invasion movies are good at getting under the skin of just about anyone, but the masks are so spectacularly well-designed that they'll stick in your nightmares much longer than any of their peers. And the sound design is also pretty sharp, buffeting you with eerie silence until a sudden sharp shock slices through the tension. 

But one thing that really skeeves me out the most is the fact that the masked figures here are actually given a voice. It is established horror movie dogma that masked killers don't speak, because it is scarier that way. But when the doll face mask mutters one line in a cruel monotone, that's even creepier because it's not supposed to happen. By breaking the rules and conventions of the horror genre, The Strangers reached an even higher plane than those that came before, at least for one scene, and that's the reason it's a classic.

The atmosphere created by The Strangers is unassailable, and certainly the reason it has enjoyed such a sterling reputation in spite of its fairly major flaws.

That said, the bleakness and lack of catharsis in this movie isn't for everyone. You have to be in a certain mood to truly enjoy The Strangers, because it is not a movie designed to be enjoyed. It's designed to be a sensory battering ram, and it's just as blunt, crude, and powerful as you'd expect one of those to be.

TL;DR: The Strangers is a solid low budget shocker, though it obviously has its limitations.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 926
Reviews In This Series
The Strangers (Bertino, 2008)
The Strangers: Prey at Night (Roberts, 2018)

My, What High Hopes You Have

Year: 2016

Director: Bryan Bertino

Cast: Zoe Kazan, Ella Ballentine, Aaron Douglas 

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I’m one of the few horror fans on this planet to be approaching Bryan Bertino’s The Monster with a blank slate, not having seen his 2008 home invasion hit The Strangers (he’s only made one film between then and now, the direct-to-Netflix Mockingbird, because Hollywood is a fickle, brutal desert of an industry). I came genuinely wanting to experience this particular story, not because I was a fan of his successful, (by all accounts) nasty-minded debut. Did that enhance my experience? Probably. The Monster is, tonally, nothing like The Strangers. But enhancement or not, The Monster is not a sophomore theatrical feature that inspires much confidence.

Although, “theatrical” is a term that stretches it a bit for a film that debuted on DirectTV, because Hollywood just won’t stop kicking this guy.

Here’s the barbarically simple plot: Kathy (Zoe Kazan, who looks 15 but is actually 33) is an alcoholic single mother who is driving her daughter Lizzy (Ella Ballentine, who looks 15 because she is 15) to stay with her father, possibly forever. Their strained relationship is put to the test when they crash, stranding them on a desolate highway in the rain. Oh, and there’s a giant monster outside that wants to devour them.

Cujo, eat your heart out.

There are many, many horror films that have the exact same structure as The Monster (someone is trapped in a bad situation, a variety of potential saviors stumble across them only to be ruthlessly mowed down). It’s all in the way you spice the broth: Inside and Misery ramp up the tension with brutal gore and chilling performances. Knock Knock fails because it’s not very good. The Monster attempts to gussy itself up with a stab at family drama, but it’s more forced than an actress’s laugh at a producer’s dinner party, so the whole thing turns out rather bland.

There is a way to make a genuinely great motion picture out of The Monster. The elements are all there, they just need a little tweaking: The cinematography has a tendency to catch slices of gorgeousness in its rain-drenched greenery, The Monster is a weighty triumph of drippy, low-budget design (even if he looks a little too much like Pumpkinhead got into a The Fly transporter mishap with a gorilla), and the concept really is killer. There are moments of abject terror where a little girl is forced to watch a giant creature destroy adults meant to protect her and consider her own impending doom.

But that f**king family drama, man. It can work well in horror, as proved by the likes of The Babadook, but this mother-daughter rift is a miserable, sputtering dud that fogs up every inch of The Monster. Instead of letting their animosity grow from their perilous situation, the film is littered with intrusive flashbacks that stop the film dead for some grueling, overacted emotional shrapnel that in no way informs the actual story we’re attempting to watch play out. It absolutely shreds the pacing, and the movie miserably fails to jerry-rig even the simplest emotional payoff to this arc. [SPOILERS: By which I mean that Kathy does sacrifice herself for Lizzy, only for the scene to immediately make a 180 degree reversal and scuttle the entire arc by throwing Lizzy right back into the thick of things and immediately forgetting about her mom.]

Although it’s for the best, because I would be truly embarrassed if The Monster actually succeeded in making me cry.

But let’s knock that drama to the side for a minute (gladly) and focus on the lean horror story at the center of this film. Is The Monster scary? In brief, no. In not-so-brief, there are a couple sequences, like I mentioned earlier, that wring something desperate and raw from Lizzy’s situation. But the execution of this simple plot is viciously clunky, even without the flashbacks gouging out huge chunks of time at climactic moments, that the fear engine stalls long before the credits roll.

The biggest roadblock to The Monster maintaining a solid horror tone is its inconsistency. One second the girls can hear every water droplet and snapped twig in the surrounding forest, the net they’re deaf as a post when somebody is being mauled directly under the car. And the monster will strike randomly, be driven away by a single blow, then I guess chill out and watch Netflix in the woods until his prey have had the chance to hold a long heart-t-heart and argue over an action plan.

And, given the truly ludicrous amount of head-start time the monster has given them, you’d think their plans wouldn’t be so idiotic. The Monster sets up false dichotomies like it’s being sponsored by the concept of the logical fallacy: “we must do This Idiotic Thing or else WE WILL DIE(!!!)” Conclusions that are reached with no evidence are immediately disproven within two scenes. These moments are such baldly obvious bids for setting up another fright gag that you can practically see the strings. This unasked-for peek behind the curtain deflates any atmosphere that has held out for this long.

No, some vaguely sinister imagery is not enough to redeem the garishly stupid antics that eviscerate what could have been a taut, emotional thriller. Maybe I should just never have high hopes for a movie ever again.

TL;DR: The Monster is a poor horror film and a poorer family drama.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 923