Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Renny Harlin
Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Ema Horvath, Pablo Sandstrom, Richard Brake
The most unwarranted trilogy since Peter Jackson's The Hobbit finally concludes with The Strangers: Chapter 3. Not since putting my pen down at the conclusion of my final school exam have I felt such a sense of freedom as I experienced when the end credits rolled. Enduring Renny Harlin's pointlessly extended reboot of Bryan Bertino's 2008 chiller has proven less a wild ride and more the sort of interminable journey that prompts you to ask "Are we there yet?" every five minutes. As it turns out, there is no "there," as this is the very definition of anti-climactic.
This one picks up right after the conclusion of Chapter 2, which saw final girl Maya (Madelaine Petsch) take out "Pin-up Girl," one of the three masked meanies that killed her boyfriend in the first chapter and have stalked her ever since. Dazed by the act of violence she was just forced to commit, Maya is captured by the surviving killers, Scarecrow and Dollface, who plan to make her Pin-Up's replacement. Meanwhile, Maya's sister Debbie (Rachel Shenton) has arrived in town with her husband Howard (George Young) and their bodyguard (???) Marcus (Miles Yekinni), hoping to track down Maya but meeting resistance from the townsfolk.
The first chapter was mediocre but it was at least mildly interesting in how it subverted the 2008 original by making Maya's boyfriend such an asshole that it implied they weren't randomly targeted after all but selected because of his condescending treatment of the local yokels. The implication was that maybe the strangers of the title weren't the masked villains after all, but rather our out-of-town protagonists. Chapter 3 confirms this by highlighting the word "strangers" in the dictionary definition of "serial killer" that opens the movie. But then it goes on to contradict itself by presenting flashbacks in which the villains do indeed select their victims on a purely random basis.
The second chapter did at least give us a few sequences of the stalk and slash variety you expect from this sort of fare, even if they weren't very well staged (Harlin is far better suited to the action genre than horror). This time we don't get any such distraction. Characters are introduced and dispatched immediately, with no time taken to build up suspense, and those flashbacks to the teenage exploits of the killers fail to give their victims any agency, meaning we're left to dispassionately watch as random strangers are butchered.
Only Petsch comes out of this with any dignity. Over three bad movies she's managed to make hay out of burnt straw by humanising a final girl so thinly drawn she virtually disappears when viewed in profile. This time she spends most of the movie in a daze, and the big moment when Maya finally turns the tables on her aggressors has none of the required impact. We're all just burnt out by that point, and we just want to get the ordeal over with. A final "reveal" of who is under one of the masks is played as though it's supposed to be a shock, but we were practically told their identity straight up in the previous movie; and given their build, there's no other character it could possibly be.
I didn't subject myself to more than one Hobbit movie, but horror is my beat and I naively convinced myself that Harlin must have something up his sleeve for this final instalment. We horror fans are the biggest suckers around, and we've once again been done up like a kipper. Why did Harlin do this to us? Because we're here.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 is in UK/ROI cinemas from February 6th.
