The Strangers: Chapter 1. M. 91 minutes. 3 stars.
Movie economics are strange things when films can be half-billion dollar earners but fail to break even, though one economic rule seems true everywhere: where money is made, a sequel will follow.
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American production company Lionsgate enjoyed a very profitable result from the tense 2008 horror film The Strangers, earning US $82 million from its $9 million budget, and its 2018 sequel brought in $32 million from a $5 million budget.
We haven't even talked about what those films were about and whether you might want to see them, but to a film studio those figures speak for themselves and Lionsgate has doubled down, nay it's tripled down, on a series of sequels, actually prequels.
The company invested in three prequel films shot back-to-back last year in the fiscally sensible Bratislava in Slovakia where film crews cost far less than Hollywood. It smashed the entire shoot into two months and was able to reuse cast and sets.
And as the three films roll out in cinemas across 2024, it'll also be saving money on marketing.
Unlike most sequels that come out many years apart and need expensive advertising reminding audiences what they liked about the original film, each of these Strangers sequels will be hitting streaming as the next film drops at cinemas. The awareness of its brand will be almost cost-free.
The premise of the first film was simple, the classic horror film "cabin in the woods" trope. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman played a couple who regret answering their front door one night as a mysterious woman asks, "Is Tamara home?" as a precursor to a night of knife-slashing mask-wearing killers toying with them.
The 2018 sequel changed the cast and locations but served pretty much the same storyline, and the questions going into this Chapter 1 prequel are, will we really find out who these killers are and what their motivation is?
Yes and no, of course, is the answer, though mostly no for now, because they have two more films to come a-knocking before the end of the year.
Into backwater Oregon roll photogenic couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez). When car troubles prevent them from rolling back out again, they rent that cabin-in-the-woods and try to make the best of the situation for a little staycation.
In town they meet a series of kooky small-town types, and at night it seems they might be meeting them again when they get a knock on the cabin door.
Strangers wearing toy masks spend the night playing with Maya and Ryan, taking more pleasure in psychological torture than in real violence, though that violence is certainly there.
Where does this set of strangers fit in with those from the other films, and does anybody make it to the upcoming sequels, I shan't spoil.
The director here is Renny Harlin, and that's a serious hire for these films. They might be made with economic sensibility, but they're not being made cheaply, and Harlin approaches the material with respect for the genre, both honouring it and subverting it where needed.
Younger audiences might already be familiar with Petsch, scream queen and resident bad girl from Riverdale.
I think she's great here, and we get to know enough about Maya and Ryan to be cheering for them once the trouble starts, but screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland also let us into the bad guys a little too.
The point of films like this is to point out own our sadism as the audience, taking enjoyment from watching these characters suffer.
At least this is escapist pretend suffering, not the real stuff we see nightly on the news.
