The Strangers: Prey at Night - Movie Review

Starring Bailee Madison, Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson and Lewis Pullman.
Written by Bryan Bertino, Ben Ketai.
Directed by Johannes Roberts.

★½

The first one was a methodically paced home invasion thriller. The three killers slowly circled in, and they had the ability to be at the right place at the right time. This time around, the pacing stops and starts, and the killers apparently have the gift of teleportation.

Mom, Dad, Son, and Daughter pull into a trailer park at night that an aunt and uncle run. There's 15 minutes or so of backstory, where Daughter's about to be sent away to boarding school and is furious with her family. But the Strangers make their presence known fairly quickly and from that, it's a lot of running around in the dark in a trailer park that must exist in some mind-bending section of the universe where it keeps circling back on itself.

It has some perverse flavor (the Man in the Mask listens to Air Supply when he kills), but it uses all the usual slasher-flick tropes without much creativity. The beginning is early Wes Craven nastiness, but by the end, it's more of the later Friday the 13th self-awareness.