By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Johannes Roberts
Cast: Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson, Bailee Madison, Lewis Pullman, Emma Bellomy, Damien Maffei and Lea Enslin.
Rating: Poor.
Johannes Roberts, director of “47 Meters Down” and “The Other Side of The Door” brings “The Strangers: Prey at Night”, the sequel of the 2008 film and the results of this movie are not good.
Based on true events, the family centers in family from Seattle conformed by Cindy (Christina Hendricks), her husband Mike (Martin Henderson), their son Luke (Lewis Pullman) and their troubled daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison).
The family takes a road trip to stay in a secluded mobile home owned by Cindy´s Uncle. Everything will change when three masked psychopaths begin to disrupt them and are in a rampage to kill the family.
Now the whole family has to figure out a way to survive before it´s too late and the killers continue their rampage towards other families.
When the opening image of “The Strangers: Prey At Night” appeared I imagined what I was going to see but sometimes in a naïve way I like to give the benefit of doubt but here it was too much.
I don´t know what was the intention of Johannes Roberts in this film but it looked like a complete ripoff of a John Carpenter movie with his music. It looks like he wanted to do a complete homage to the horror film director but it was not the case, which reminds that this is not the first he has done this. I remember in last year´s “47 Meters Down”, also directed by Roberts that he did the same thing and it was too obvious.
The screenplay written by Bryan Bertino, who happens to be the director of the first installment of “The Strangers” and Ben Ketai was one of the dumbiest that I have ever seen. The dialogue of this film doesn´t make any sense, looks fake and the resolutions for the characters are completely idiotic.
In the moment that one of the characters tries to fix a problem, he/she don´t resolve it and make it even worse. The movie looks completely fake and I never saw a motivation for this assasssins to kill people.
What really worked in movies like “Halloween”, “Friday the 13th”, “A Nightmare on Elm Street” and others is the fact that the killers had a reason to do their actions and of course they were scary as hell.
Here from a comedy stand point it´s a movie that does work. There were some jumpy moments in this picture but nothing to spectacular.
Johannes Roberts direction was all over the place and this is the second feature film I´ve seen from him and all I can think is that he completely lack of originality. I know it´s very hard on my part to say this but I don´t have other words to express what I feel but this ones.
Slasher movies can be enjoyable but here this wasn´t the case and honestly there was a moment in the film that I didn´t care for any of this characters. To make it even worst than it was the ending of the film is one of the most idiotics I´ve seen in film.
This movie should have gone straight to either On Demand or straight to DVD due to the poor quality of it and because nothing of it works. It could have had an interesting premise since it was based in true events but the execution was awful.
“The Strangers: Prey At Night” is one of the dumbiest films of this years so far and I cannot recommend it for any reason at all. I believe that horror fans are going to be disappointed and if you haven´t seen please do not waste your time and money in this piece of garbage.