Doktor Holocaust Reviews: The Strangers

Short version:  low on gore, high on chills, no campy over-the-top stuff, minimal cinematic absurdity, just two people trapped in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere because three masked lunatics trashed their car and have decided to scare the bejeezus out of them until sunrise.  High marks for elegance and simplicity.

long version is after the break.

Long version:  Beautiful premise.  No radiation-mutated inbred miners or homozygous Texas hillbillies with chainsaws.  just… people.  three of them.  with cheap dime-store masks on two, and one wearing what appears for all the world to be the outer layer of a decorate throw-pillow, cut open, turned inside out, and punctured with a couple eye-holes.

We start with two unmasked people in a house, sorting out their on-the-skids relationship.  they were going to go on a road-trip together, but now it seems they might be breaking up, and are spending one last night together before calling the whole thing off.  Someone knocks at the door, a stranger, asking if Tamra is home.  the people tell her she has the wrong house, and she leaves.

The guy goes out to get cigarettes and clear his head, and then things get creepy.  IF you’ve ever had someone knock on your door at 3am when you didn’t invite anyone and weren’t expecting anyone, you can understand the creepiness here.  Who the hell goes door-to-door at houses in the middle of nowhere at 3am?  Nobody you want to open the door for, that’s who.

Things progress from there to a mostly-realistic tale of home invasion as our three masked maniacs toy with the couple.  You ever watch a cat that’s cornered some small fuzzy varmint?  I did once.  A roommate’s cat had caught a vole.  The cat would smack it hard, then ignore it and start taking a bath.  The vole would play dead for a couple minutes, then try to run away, and the cat would smack it again, or bite it, or just watch it go and then pounce on it.

This is what the masked people do to the maybe-still-lovers.  The movie does a nice job separating chills from violence.  Some of the finest chills are scenes where one of the victims is standing in the house, wholly oblivious to the masked maniac hovering somewhere behind them briefly, then wandering off-screen because… well… because they can.  They can kill the sorta-lovebirds whenever they want, after all, and it’s more fun to give them those little pauses.

There were two flagrant absurdities in the movie, one I liked and one I didn’t.

The one I didn’t:  the guy who says he’s never used a gun before and can’t even load one seems to do a pretty good job assembling his father’s old hunting rifle, and has surprisingly good aim.

The one I did:  The leader, whom I will call Captain Pillowcase, is apparently a fairly in-shape asthmatic.  One minute he’s suprisingly spry, running quickly or otherwise doing something physically vigorous, but the next he has an audible wheeze.  I almost wanted to toss him my Albuterol inhaler.  There were moments where he just sat there, wheezing, slouching, trying to get some air in his lungs before the next round of cat-and-mouse.

As I mentioned earlier, this movie is light on gore.  Not a lot of fancy wound prosthetics, no still-twitching maimed corpses, just little things, scrapes and cuts and bruises.  the scares in this movie come from watching two people whose nerves are already on edge get driven deep into hopelessness and terror by three maniacs who have them cornered and are taking their time closing in.

overall:  I’d say this tasty little stalk-and-slash gets high marks for elegance and tasteful simplicity, more than enough to forgive the gun thing.

Tags: hillary clinton, horror, martha stewart, movie, movies, pillows, pop tarts, review, the strangers