Okay, so…horror movie. No one’s surprised, right? I think by now, the majority of people who know me, or follow my blog, know that horror movies are my bread and butter of film genre.
I watched the first Strangers movie, which was actually really creepy and did really well at having the masked strangers just appear in the house, without drawing any attention to that. I felt that this movie tried to do something very similar, but unfortunately, it didn’t do anything different to the original home invasion movie, so there was very little to make it stand out from its predecessor.
I did like Ryan and Maya’s relationship, although a lot of the movie very much felt like a stereotypical horror where the main characters end up in a small town that just has a weird, almost creepy feel to it. Honestly, if I was in that position, I wouldn’t be staying in an airbnb right in the middle of the woods. And the moment someone started banging on the door, I would have been calling the police…because no one who has good intentions is going to be out in the middle of the woods at that time of night.
I originally thought that Ryan having asthma and needing to use an inhaler was a nice touch…but it didn’t really seem to have an impact on him throughout the movie. Okay, there was one cool scene where he used a bottle to breathe into and then used that sound to get the upper hand…but unfortunately, it was fairly obvious how the movie was going to end. Even if I hadn’t seen the previous movies in the franchise, the trailer gave away a lot of what was going to happen throughout.
I was somewhat disappointed because I thought the movie was going to show a bit more about the Strangers and how they interacted with each other. Yes, the scariest thing about them is that there’s no reason why they’re going on killing sprees, but I do think there could have been subtle ways for their personalities to come through.
On the whole, I really don’t think there was much to make this movie stand out from the previous two in the franchise. Most of what happened in the movie had already been done in the previous two movies, and it was fairly obvious where the movie was going. I can’t really say it added a whole lot to the franchise, to be honest.