Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Renny Harlin
Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Richard Brake
If you're expecting The Strangers: Chapter 2 to be the Empire Strikes Back of slasher movies, you clearly haven't seen The Strangers: Chapter 1. What made 2008's The Strangers and its superior sequel Prey at Night work was the ambiguity of the killers, the apparent lack of reason behind their brutality. But like Rob Zombie before him, Harlin and his screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland missed the point and decided that their killers shouldn't be ambiguous after all. While their exact identities aren't entirely revealed in this sequel, we're "treated" to flashbacks to their childhoods and the origins of their evil. It doesn't make them any scarier; if anything it makes them less so.
Taking its cues from 1981's Halloween II, this middle chapter opens in the immediate aftermath of the first film with its heroine, Maya (Madelaine Petsch), waking in a hospital where she is subsequently stalked by her masked attackers. Playing out very much like a second act rather than a standalone movie, Chapter 2 is essentially one long stalking sequence as Maya evades capture, becomes paranoid about the intentions of anyone who tries to help her, and even wrestles with a wild boar in a nod to Russell Mulcahy's Ozploitation classic Razorback.
There's no reason why this shouldn't work, but Harlin and his writers consistently fail to offer the audience anything we haven't seen before. As with the previous entry, Harlin's staging is predictable and uninspired. He rehashes the same setup - that of Maya hiding behind one of several doors which are slowly opened by one of her foes - at least three times in different settings, making for a repetitive watch. The confusing editing often makes it seem like the people involved are defying the laws of physics, suddenly appearing in places they couldn't possibly be at that moment. It also doesn't help that the two female strangers are barely distinguishable, creating even more confusion in points. There's some recurring shtick of Maya imagining everyone she encounters wearing the masks, which leads to a boy who cried wolf scenario when the actual strangers show up.
Petsch can't be faulted for her commitment, but Maya simply isn't an interesting enough protagonist to carry a trilogy. She's also laughably invincible. As soon as she wakes in her hospital bed she's somehow able to sprint around like Usain Bolt, and despite the many injuries she acquires throughout the film she never loses this athleticism. Another major problem with this movie is that we know Maya is highly unlikely to be killed in the second part of a trilogy, and there are no other potential victims for us to worry about. Two movies in and all Harlin has done is deliver a pointlessly long exercise in IP mining. Will Chapter 3 prove the final insult?
The Strangers: Chapter 2 is in UK/ROI cinemas from September 26th.
