The Town Herald

The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

The Strangers

Review by [Alexi Ice]



To follow the theme of fear and phobias, I must review a film I just recently viewed on pay-per-view. I thought it might be a sickening thrill ride following in the footsteps of movies like 'Disturbia' and to some extent 'When a stranger calls, the original version' but I was soon sadly disappointed. The entire first hour or so of the movie was spent highlighting the lives of a man who had just proposed to the woman of his dreams, who then in turn denied his proposal. The scenes moved slowly as the movie moved forward and I thought about one hour and thirty minutes in I had rented the wrong movie because there wasn’t even a slight hint of the horror I was hoping for.

And then it happened! The woman was standing in her kitchen when you are first introduced to the strangers, a group of people seeming to be a man and two women wearing masks. You find yourself thinking 'oh, this will be good!' But it isn’t. The strangers seem to have open access to the home considering the man and woman keep locking the doors and windows and they keep getting back in. The struggle between the two 'lovers' and these strangers is embarrassingly unrealistic. Did anyone think of calling the police? I guess not. They just grab a shotgun and hunker down, accidentally shooting someone they shouldn’t have, abandoning the shotgun which could have saved them, and being captured. There was plenty of gore and violence but you would be better off watching a supernatural horror movie instead. At least those have some realistic points to make. In the end the strangers ride off into the sunset and you are left to wonder why you rented the movie in the first place. Had you just wasted an entire two hours on maybe ten minutes of really good bloodshed?

The movie and its lack of creativity were only the beginning. Watching it on a 72" flat screen with the volume all the way up STILL did nothing for the fact that the actors and actresses mumbled the entire time. No enunciation or anything. And there was little more story line than 'we are strangers and for no apparent reason, we are going to kill this struggling couple.'

 That movie wasn't a thrill ride, rather than a grotesque gore fest with a minute of cool violence. The Strangers will receive little more than a 2 out of 5 from me.



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