| Overall Grade: |
D- |
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| Story: |
C |
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| Acting: |
B |
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|
| Direction: |
C- |
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|
| Visuals: |
B- |
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|
The Strangers Exploited
by Ian (movies profile)
Jun 2, 2008
2
of
2 people found this review helpful
The Strangers for me didn’t max out its’ potential. The set up (perhaps hackneyed) but none the less intriguing, placed two unsuspecting victims in a pastoral community where the nearest convenient store (if you can call it that) is an hour away. To some extent, the director at the start places good vulnerability on the characters and teases the audience with glimpses of eerie visceral ambiances, sounds and encounters. I think the problem existed in the opening scene where too much about the fate of the two main stars in the movie was revealed.
Part of what makes a suspense/horror movie effective, is exploiting the vulnerability of a protagonist characters to the point where the viewer believes that one or more of them is expendable. Even when the viewer becomes aware of whom the main player is, they believe on some level, that that individual may not be around to read the ending credits. With The Strangers however, it was evident in the beginning that the main players where not going to make it, so it gave little reason for the viewers to have any attachment to them at all because in direct contradiction to what I said before, even as the viewer knows that everyone in a movie can die, they also want the main character to survive.
The movie felt exploited, repeating the initial effectiveness of the strangers over and over again until it grew tired at the end. I didn’t care about the main characters and essentially just found myself waiting for the inevitable, an ending that started exactly the way it began. The movie had little in the way of twists and turns and it lacked that “protagonist gotcha” moment where the villain is outsmarted. |
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