After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple is forced to spend the night in a remote cabin. Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is directed by Renny Harlin director of Die Hard 2 (1990), A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988), Cliffhanger (1993), Deep Blue Sea (1999), Devil's Pass (2013), The Legend Of Hercules (2014), The Bricklayer (2024) and many others!
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is the third film in The Strangers series and the first installment of a standalone trilogy not having anything to do with The Strangers (2008) or The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018). So The Strangers movies have always been divisive, The Strangers (2008) definitely has a lot of fans but there's a lot of people who really did not like it. I'm someone who really loves it all though over time I do have my criticisms of it. The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018) at the time when it came out was torn to shreds (outside of everyone agreeing the pool scene was excellent). Which I could see why, it had a drastically different atmosphere than the first movie, where as the first movie was going for this brutal, dark and more grounded approach Prey At Night went for more of an 80s slasher approach. Luckily over time Prey At Night has gotten its flowers and it's become a cult classic in its own way, I personally liked it when it first came out. But now I really like it even more. That leads us to the first of a trilogy The Strangers: Chapter One a movie that attempts to take the series back to its roots by going for an atmosphere more like the 2008 movie…only problem here is by doing that it's just the 2008 movie all over again but somehow so much worse.
The couple we follow in this movie are just not interesting at all, Madelaine Petsch really tries her best with such a bland script but it's ultimately nowhere near enough to save this movie from being a disaster. There's a few fun chase sequences that are solid, but that's all you can really say about them. They really have nothing going for them at all and are serviceable at best. That in itself really shows just how little care or creativity went into this mess.
I can usually excuse dumb decisions in horror films as long as it doesn't generally hurt the movie so much it never recovers or if the movie itself isn't trying to be realistic. The couple in the 2008 movie made some dumb decisions but it wasn't enough to hurt the entire movie. In this case however there is so much dumb decision making that it almost becomes a parody, one thing I will say is the kills here aren't that bad. They definitely have this brutal nature to them this pretty nasty which is probably the most fun this movie has to offer.
The major issue here is that there really isn't much of a difference from the 2008 film and Chapter 1, both have the same sort of atmosphere yes but the 2008 film has the suspense, build up and strength to push through to the finish line. The couple in the 2008 film while yes flawed when it comes to the writing, were at the very least interesting enough for the viewer to follow. Heck at the time the film creeped out a lot of people so that has to count for something. Chapter 1 however comes off as trying to replicate what made the 2008 film great but completely forgets a lot of key parts, the atmosphere doesn't have the suspense since we have really seen this all before. The couple in this movie as I said before are not interesting at all and lack so much personality that fails to connect with the viewer. Finally the build up is incredibly lacking, we get some fine enough chase scenes but that's it. We don't get anything we haven't seen before anything worthwhile.
Overall The Strangers: Chapter 1 is not a promising start to the trilogy, I'm not entirely sure how they are going to be able to really recover from this mess but I guess we will see.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 is available on all VOD platforms.
3/10 D-
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