Released: 5th February
Seen: 28th March
When I tried to watch the movie I plan on reviewing today, I decided to watch it using my Chromecast on my TV. I have one of those Chromecasts that uses apps so I can just open up the AppleTV app and watch anything I’d bought on iTunes on my TV, it’s very handy. So, I rented The Strangers: Chapter 3 and started to try and watch it and on no less than 4 occasions during the movie, the video stopped and the Chromecast proclaimed there was an error and it needed to stop… I should’ve taken that as an omen, the Chromecast was trying to protect me from absolute garbage but nonetheless I persisted.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 is the concluding entry in the recent attempt to revitalise The Strangers franchise. It picks up right after Chapter 2 where Maya (Madelaine Petsch) has just killed one of The Strangers and tries to make a run for it. It looks like she’s going to make it to freedom but, oh no, she fucks up almost instantly and gets captured by the other two strangers who decide that she should be the replacement for their fallen comrade and so, for some reason, drag her along with them. She’s put in the Pin Up girl mask, takes part in a standard Strangers murder, then proceeds to get incredibly lucky and do whatever she needs to do to escape. Oh, also there’s a bunch of Strangers backstory because that’s a thing we need, apparently.
This trilogy has so far proven to be absolutely pointless in every way. The first part (which I briefly reviewed in my 100+ Horror Movies in 92 Days post) was just a basic remake of the original, mostly harmless but lacked a lot of what made the original special. The second part (didn’t review, because I just couldn’t be fucking bothered) was an extended chase scene cut up with clips from The Strangers’ youth so we could learn that them asking if Tamara was home was a reference to a childhood game they played. The third one mixes the pointless harmless boredom of part one with the unwanted backstory from part two and does all of it while on horse tranquilisers, so it’s also not good.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 seems to be under the delusion that the way to create tension is to just have everyone move extra slowly and look about for minutes at a time without saying anything, to the point where it can almost become comical. Sometimes being slow moving can be scary (Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees are almost perfect examples of that) but this movie doesn’t have the skill required to make such a thing work, everyone is just slow as shit and it makes for a boring experience. I didn’t know it was possible to be bored while someone is being impaled on a machete but apparently that’s a thing that can be done.
Speaking of being impaled on a machete, this film also doesn’t really bother to do the courtesy of having any interesting kills, a cornerstone of the slasher genre. This little trilogy has already denied me the tension, nihilism and sheer anxiety that the original movie was so happy to provide, the least it could do in return was shock me with some interesting kills but it would almost rather have its kills happen off screen or just below the screen where it can be implied but not shown. Maybe once or twice for a background character this would be fine, but even major characters whose deaths should actually matter are killed off in such a bland manner that you almost don’t know they’ve been killed until a minute afterwards.
Possibly one of the biggest sins that this film does is something that Part 2 dabbled in but this film revels in and that’s giving the titular Strangers backstory to try and explain their actions. It’s the kind of shit that slasher remakes do all the time, trying to justify why the killer was a killer except it’s particularly bad to do this with The Strangers because the thing that made them so scary was the fact that you had no idea who they were or why they were doing anything. The explanation they give in the original film of “Because you were home” is bone-chilling because it confirms how random this violent act was. The fact we never saw their faces made it terrifying because they could be literally anyone from anywhere, it’s even implied in that original film that it was their first time ever doing such a thing but this film just says that the titular strangers were always murderers since they were kids, everyone in town knows it and no one really stops them because of some reasons that make no sense whatsoever. Somehow, by giving the villains a lengthy backstory, this film has not only removed the mystique around them but made them even less interesting than they were before.
On top of all this we have to throw in Maya, one of the most useless final girls to ever exist. A final girl who is either basically catatonic for most of the film or waiting for the bad guys to basically put a knife in her hand so she can do something about it. She spends almost The Strangers: Chapter 3 dead behind the eyes, barely even reacting to the horrors around her and I get that they’re trying to show how broken she is by everything she’s been through over the last several movies but part of the reason to break her is for her to be strong again by the end of the film, this just doesn’t do that. It’s almost like she’s on autopilot, she doesn’t have agency so much as she just knows there are certain things a person in her situation is expected to do. She’s not being resourceful or smart, she’s not kicking ass and showing strength, she’s just lucky that this film decided that The Strangers weren’t going to kill her for no valid reason.
So with no good kills, no good scares, no good characters and no real hero, does the film at least look good? Again, no. It’s all just kind of bad to look at, none of the scenes are interesting or well shot, some of the framing is so bad that it hides key information and since everything moves so slowly, there’s times when you genuinely wonder if you’re just staring at a still image. The editing is also just shoddy, in several points, moments are cut so haphazardly that the only response is to go “Wait, why are we here now?” because it makes no sense. It’s kind of weird for a film to feel padded with garbage to get the runtime up but also edited in a way where major information feels like it’s missing but somehow this film pulls it off.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 might be the worst of the trilogy, and that’s saying a lot because this entire trilogy has been utter garbage. In theory, there was something here, a horror epic that took a classic slasher and went “Right, but what happened to the final girl after the big massacre?”. It could’ve worked, you can almost see how it could’ve worked, but nothing about this works. It’s not scary, it’s not tense, it’s not memorable in any fashion. There isn’t a single solitary second of this film that’s worth any attention, calling it cinematic Ambien is the most polite thing I could say about it… but to hell with polite, it’s an exhaustingly boring piece of shit and I hope this is the last we see of these masked murderers because it‘s pretty clear they shouldn’t have been turned into a franchise.
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