Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

Lemony Snickett Presents
By
Michael C. Riedlinger
Editor-In-Chief

            The abject terror I felt was visceral. I would have wet myself, if not for the nearly empty lines at the men's room. I knew The Strangers was supposed to be a scary movie, but I didn't expect the only fear I felt to come from the lines of women waiting to see Sex and the City. Braving my lack of estrogen inoculation, I wandered into my theater and hoped, against the odds, for the best.

            First time writer/director Brian Bertino plays around with a few traditional horror concepts. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are a young couple with nary a brain cell between them. They arrive at a home in the middle of nowhere, psychos randomly show up, and they end up dead by the end of the film. Of course, the film opens with a couple of Mormon kids finding the bodies, so the tension in this film comes not from “will they die?”, but instead “how?”. That question we already know the answer to, as the titular strangers show up and start terrorizing the couple to the best of their ability. The phone lines are cut, cell phones destroyed, and creepy messages are painted where they will be found. Once an antique looking pick-up truck demolishes the couple’s car, we know that they’re screwed for sure.

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            The problem is, their deaths are entirely avoidable, and in a culture deluged with torture-porn and slasher flicks, it is frankly unacceptable. After the first pounding attack on the front door, no reasonable human being would hesitate to call the police. Somehow, Bertino expects us to accept that stupidity and common sense should still go out the window after thirty years of seeing camp victims slaughtered by hockey-loving psychos. In all fiction, the suspension of disbelief is necessary, but the storyteller needs to grant the audience some credit. Bertino fails at that miserably. For example, if anyone saw a trio of masked strangers wielding knives and axes hiding out in the backyard, and discovered their tires had been slashed, I have no doubt that the car owner would still chance ruining the rims by driving on them to get away. Only, that means that the main characters wouldn’t die, so I guess they needed to forgo millions of years of survival instinct in order for the movie to continue.

            Another problem here is that there are only two protagonists, and once they are dead, the movie is over. Bertino solves this problem by having a friend show up to check on the couple. This might work in the story’s favor, but we already know that Scott Speedmen is hiding in a side-room with a shotgun. Heck, before he winds up with his brains splattered on the wall, we despise the friend for his own brand of idiocy. As he parks in front of the house in the middle of nowhere, a brick crashes through his windshield. Does he call the police on his working cell? Does he drive off to the nearest gas station to find safe haven? Does he even seem worried when, against all logic, he walks into the trashed house with the axe through the front door to find it seemingly abandoned? No. He just walks into a gunshot blast that he frankly deserves.

            The Strangers is one of those horror films without a brain that’s only good for a few laughs. It doesn’t try to say anything allegorically, and you will spend your time shouting “Don’t go in there!” at the screen. What’s worse is that the film opens with the “based on true events” line that we’ve all come to understand as little more than a cheap psychological trope used when there isn’t enough visceral fear generated by a horror film. Save your money and go rent the original Funny Games if you want a smart, disturbing and scary film about what can happen when strangers turn out to be everything we fear them to be.