The Strangers

PLOT (spoiler alert!!!):

On the night of February 11, 2005, Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) return to a remote summer vacation home owned by James’s parents after attending a friend’s wedding reception. Shortly after arriving in the middle of the night, a young blonde woman (Gemma Ward), whose face is obscured by low lighting, knocks on the front door asking for a Tamara, but leaves after James and Kristen tell her she is at the wrong house.

A short while later, James leaves to buy Kristen a pack of cigarettes, when the woman returns and begins to pound harshly on the front door. Kristen refuses to open up, locks all the doors, and tries to call James on her cell phone, which she discovers to be dead. She plugs it into the wall to charge near the fireplace and calls James on the house phone briefly before the line goes dead. She returns to the fireplace to retrieve her cell phone, but it has disappeared. Kristen then hears a noise coming from the back door. She grabs a large kitchen knife and opens the curtains, seeing a man wearing a sack mask over his head. Kristen screams and trips over a record player, and it begins to skip repeatedly. The front door then opens slightly, and Kristen peeks outside, only to see the blond woman in a Dollface mask. She slams and locks the door before going to hide in the bedroom. After yelling “go away,” the noises eventually stop, at which point she hears footsteps coming from the hallway, which turn out to be from James. As she explains what happened while he was gone, he tries to calm her down.

She frantically explains to James that she saw a man in a mask, and heard loud banging noises. James is not worried about the incidents, thinking that they were caused by some teenagers fooling around. He goes outside to his car, whose tires have been slashed and its windshield smashed in. As he searches the car, someone touches his back, but they run away before he is able to turn around and see them. Once he turns back to the car, he looks up and sees Dollface, and asks her to leave. After she runs off, James persuades Kristen that they need to escape in their car.

As they are backing out of the driveway, a large truck pulls up behind them with its floodlights on, revealing another woman, this one wearing a Pin-up mask. After she smashes the truck into the couples’ car, James and Kristen run back into the house, where James finds a shotgun. As the couple approach the front door armed with the gun, the Man in the Mask begins breaking down the door with an axe. Terrified, the couple block the door with a piano, and James attempts to shoot him, but misses. The couple decide to hole up in a bedroom, facing the open doorway with the shotgun armed and ready. They hear footsteps in the house, and one of the intruders puts on a country record.

James’s friend, Mike (Glenn Howerton), who James contacted earlier, arrives at the house in his car. When he tries to call James’s cell phone, it goes straight to voicemail. But while he is leaving a message, a rock crashes through his windshield, prompting him to jump out of the car. Baffled, he notices country music playing loudly from the house. He steps onto the porch and fails to notice Dollface hiding in the shadows there before entering the house. As Mike walks down the hallway, the Man in the Mask appears behind him, holding up the axe. When Mike steps in front of the closet, James fires the shotgun, thinking it is one of the masked killers, and kills Mike by shooting him in the face. After James and Kristen realize they killed Mike, they decide to leave the house to get help.

James leaves the house first, promising Kristen that he will return in a few minutes, but Kristen decides not to wait for him to return, and leaves to go to a shed in the backyard. There, she finds a radio, which she uses to try and contact someone for help, but when she raises her voice, Pin-Up Girl appears and smashes the radio. Kristen returns to the house to look for James. As she walks down the hall, she hears a few keys being played on the piano, followed by footsteps, and the lights suddenly shut off. The Man in the Mask enters the hallway, but does not notice Kristen, as he is looking in the other direction. Kristen hides in the kitchen pantry while the man searches the hallway. He sits down at the table a few feet away from the closet before leaving the room. Kristen peers out of the closet, only to find the blond, masked woman staring back at her. The woman breaks the pantry door in, but suddenly stops. Kristen exits the closet to find the woman waiting for her with a knife. Kristen opens a kitchen drawer to arm herself as well when James is pushed into the house by the masked man, who now has the gun. When James tells Kristen to run, she sprints for the front door, only to find Pin-Up girl blocking her way. She runs into a bedroom and slams the door before attempting to escape through the window, and suddenly the lights come back on and the door swings open. Kristen walks back toward the hall to see who opened the door, when the Man in the Mask grabs her and throws her into the wall. Barely conscious, she is dragged down the hallway.

James and Kristen wake up the next day and find themselves tied to chairs in the living room while the three strangers stand over them. Before removing their masks, Pin-Up Girl walks into the kitchen and returns with a large knife. Kristen asks, “Why are you doing this to us?” and Dollface answers, “Because you were home.” Each of the strangers then takes turns stabbing James and Kristen seemingly to death. After they escape, Dollface shows feelings of guilt, and they stop the truck for her to ask two young Christian boys for a religious pamphlet, before continuing to drive away with Pin-Up Girl telling her that “It’ll be easier next time.” The two young Christian boys (Alex Fisher and Peter Clayton-Luce) are then seen entering the house only to find James and Kristen lying unmoving in the living room. One of the boys goes up to Kristen, and as he is about to touch her, she grabs his arm and screams in terror.

REVIEW:

Seeing as how tomorrow is Halloween, I figured I’d do a bit of horror this weekend. The first of which is one of the films that slipped past me when it was released, The Strangers.

I’ve got to say that it was great to see a horror film that didn’t rely on graphic gore. There is a time and place for that, but truth be told, the scariest films are those where the sheer idea of something out there are what freak the audience out.

In this film, that is definitely the case, as these random strangers just seem to appear out of thin air and continue to more or less stalk the stars of the film, though it is never really revealed why until the film’s end.

I could sit here and talk about the acting and whatnot, but who watches a horror flick for the “brilliant performances”? Truth be told, anyone can star in a horror flick as long as they can run around and scream at the top of their lungs.

The creepy factor is ratcheted up by the direction of this film. Something about the way the camera pans over and we see a long figure with one of these masks on just standing there. It really is downright freaky!

Now, for some reason, The Strangers wasn’t a huge box office hit. I think that had more to do with what was released that week, though, but not sure. Having said that, some of the best horror flicks often are box office duds, or at least not the most successful. Do I think you should check this film out? sure, but it isn’t the best horror flick out there…at the same time, it isn’t the worst, either. Why not check it out and enjoy the creepiness!

3 out of 5 stars

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