The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – After their car breaks down in an eerie small town, a young couple are forced to spend the night in a remote cabin. Panic ensues as they are terrorized by three masked strangers who strike with no mercy and seemingly no motive in THE STRANGERS ― CHAPTER 1, the chilling first entry of this upcoming horror feature film series.

My Take – With the horror landscape being dominated by sequels, prequels, reboots, and remakes, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to see every original content get the similar treatment in some point in the future.

Such is the case of this latest Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Deep Blue Sea) directorial which acts as a reboot but is more of a remake and has been marketed as a prequel while also acting as the start of a new trilogy, simply told, it is an attempt to squeeze new life out of old IP.

The original, which released in 2008, saw Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a couple who, while spending the night in an unfamiliar location, find themselves menaced by three masked invaders. The experience was a short and bare-bones exercise in drip-drip suspense and thrills made scarier by its cold, motivation-less villains.

But while the film managed to recoup its budget nine times over, its much delayed sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018), despite offering a more novel setting and more dynamic protagonists, didn’t find the same acceptance.

Leading to this latest installment, which aims to refresh the franchise. Only if it wasn’t paired with a paint-by-numbers screenplay that just serves to remind us of what was once innovative has now being rendered commercial and lifeless.

Written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, the film actively resists novelty, with its worst offense being a tediously drab screenplay that chooses to be ridiculous and boring, with no real excitement until the final act.

Sure, there are some tense moments and plenty of jump scares, but they’re all undercut by a frustrating build up and a lack of atmospheric tension, which made the original a standout. Tragically, making this one yet another reminder that not everything needs to be remade or rebooted.

The story follows a blissfully happy young couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), who on a road trip to Portland to celebrate their five-year anniversary, find themselves lost upon veering off the main highway and stumble upon a small town in Oregon called Venus.

Stopping over at a local dinner to take care of their hunger, the two are surprised to find that their car refuses to start. And when two men from the diner offer to fix it, claiming it will take a day, Ryan suspects a scam, but Maya, eager to avoid confrontation, accepts their fate and the two end up taking refuge in a log cabin listed on Airbnb. Unluckily for Maya and Jeff, their temporary home for the evening is the hunting ground of a mysterious masked trio, and soon, their would-be vacation turns into a desperate fight for survival.

Simply put, following some stale foreplay, the franchise’s signature baddies begin playing cat-and-mouse with the couple all night long. When director Bryan Bertino’s 2008 psychological horror released, critics and audience were left shocked by the cold, remote brutality of the film’s violence, and the disaffected attitude of its killers made for a refreshing take on the horror formula.

But while this new installment seeks to recapture that same frigid, merciless atmosphere, but it just drops the ball at every turn. Strangely lacking in tension and suspense, it moves at a glacial, dwindling pace, following Maya and Jeff through banal dialogue and home invasion cliches: unlocked doors, turned-off lights, dropped asthma inhalers, sabotaged cars, etc.

It is so uninspired and cliched that it becomes obvious that director Renny Harlin don’t particularly care for the genre he is working on. More typically associated with bombastic action films, he doesn’t have the patience required to build real, clammy suspense or the awareness of the smaller specifics that are needed to immerse us in an intimate story such as this.

There’s just no dread or tension. Even if you pass through all the preposterous writing, there’s not much payoff. All of the good stuff is completely ripped from the original film, right down to a stranger asking if Tamara is home and unscrewing one of the porch lights. Nothing here offers any justification for why we’re here or why we should be expected to show up two more times over the next 12 months.

It doesn’t help that Madelaine Petsch and Froy Gutierrez, both former CW stars, bring out wooden performances, while playing one of the worst horror protagonists in recent memory. Richard Brake, Gabriel Basso, Rachel Shenton, Ema Horvath, Ella Bruccoleri and Joplin Sibtain also appear in pointless fleeting experiences. On the whole, ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ is a lackluster and mind-numbing retread that is painfully uninteresting and unnecessary.