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‘The Strangers: Prey At Night’ Review: Dir. Johannes Roberts (2018)

The Strangers Prey at Night review: Dollface, Pin-Up Girl and Man in the Mask return, this time to terrorise a family of four in the sequel to 2008’s The Strangers.

The Strangers: Prey at Night review, Kat Hughes.

The Strangers Prey at Night review

The Strangers Prey at Night review

Ten years ago audiences flocked to see Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman terrorised to death at the hands of three masked assailants. Now those masked killers (Dollface, Pin-Up Girl and Man in the Mask) return to incite more fear in follow-up The Strangers: Prey at Night. This time, rather than just two victims, the trio set their sights on a family of four. The quartet consists of mother Cindy (Christina Hendricks), father Mike (Martin Henderson), baseball-mad son Luke (Lewis Pullman), and delinquent daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison). The group are on a road trip across the country to deliver Kinsey to her new boarding school, a move that Cindy hopes will straighten her out. Along the way they stop off at an empty trailer park to get a restful night’s sleep. Our trio of killers have other ideas though and the family must put aside their differences if they want to survive until morning.

Try as it might, The Strangers: Prey at Night never really seems to take-off. From the opening, the narrative seems to plod along and when you analyse it, it is rather dull. What made our protagonists in The Strangers interesting is that they weren’t your usual couple. The whole ‘trying to work out their relationship post a turned down proposal’ background was intriguing and something not typically seen. Here, the family dynamic has been seen a thousand times before, and therefore doesn’t offer much in the way of dramatic tension.

The whole film feels repetitive, our various family members all doing the exact same things over and over. Get ready to watch as each person seeks shelter in an empty trailer, hears a noise, goes to investigate it and end up face to face with a stranger. Prepare to to hear the same tired lines of dialogue – ‘Who’s there?’, ‘Why are you doing this?’, ‘You don’t have to do this’, ‘Please don’t’, for what feels like the entirety of the last hour of the movie. The constant cycling through the same actions is frustrating, irritating and ultimately causes the viewer to switch off entirely.

The Strangers Prey at Night review

The Strangers Prey at Night review

Our victims also suffer from the ‘idiot victim’ trope. This family seem to have no survival skills at all between them. Almost every decision they make is the wrong one, and it’s amazing that many last as long as they do. These are people that are forever leaving life-saving weapons (like a gun!) behind, blindly walking into danger (when they know they are being hunted) and have no volume control (they happily shout out for each other or cry loudly) or other stealth skills. At least in the first film Tyler and Speedman’s characters tried to arm themselves and were able to whisper. They are so inept that you just hope that the strangers will hurry up and kill them already.

Tonally The Strangers: Prey at Night is all over the place. It starts by trying to replicate the first, but soon veers off into almost comedy-horror slasher territory. For example, our hunters seem incapable of hunting without a soundtrack this time around. So much so that in one scene our Man in the Mask searches through various radio stations until he finds the perfect song to kill to. It’s jarring and keeps the viewer from being fully immersed in proceedings, and as the songs continue to randomly pop up it makes everything too comedic. The choice of songs though are brilliant, the soundtrack is immense and easily the most impressive thing that the film has to offer. The Strangers: Prey at Night reaches its peak during a swimming poolside smackdown between Luke and the strangers set to Bonnie Tylers ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. It’s a tongue-in-cheek, neon-soaked, brutal bloodbath that elevates the film, but ultimately appears to belong in a completely different movie.

The Strangers Prey at Night review

The Strangers Prey at Night review

In terms of scare sequences, director Johannes Roberts is very hit and miss. He seems to rely too heavily on the ‘sudden loud noise’ trope, which may work as its simply an unexpected assault on the eardrums, but just comes off as cheap and unoriginal. There is one rather nifty scare involving a truck and a tunnel – it elicited actual screams in our screening – but the rest are seen coming from a mile off. There are several ‘homages’ to films such as Scream and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but rather than honouring their source, they feel like poor imitations. Given that Roberts so expertly crafted last years surprise hit 47 Metres Down, its a disappointment to see something from him that is so generic.

After ten years of waiting, fans have not been given the glorious sequel that they were hoping for. All tension is lost, the characters are weakly drawn and unoriginal, and its a tonal mismatch. An unfortunate contender for worst horror of the year, fingers crossed Roberts can return to form with 48 Metres Down.

The Strangers: Prey at Night review, by Kat Hughes, April 2018.

The Strangers: Prey at Night is released in UK cinemas on Friday 4th May 2018.

Kat Hughes is a UK born film critic and interviewer who has a passion for horror films. An editor for THN, Kat is also a Rotten Tomatoes Approved Critic. She has bylines with Ghouls Magazine, Arrow Video, Film Stories, Certified Forgotten and FILMHOUNDS and has had essays published in home entertainment releases by Vinegar Syndrome and Second Sight. When not writing about horror, Kat hosts micro podcast Movies with Mummy along with her five-year-old daughter.

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