As of late, the horror genre has disappointed. With torture porn such as Saw, Hostel, the Hills Have Eyes remakes, and dozens of other forgettable examples, horror movies have lost their way — when I watch them, I’m disgusted instead of scared. A few new directors, namely Neil Marshall with The Descent, have tried to breathe life into the genre, but torture porn movies do well enough at the box office that we know Saw 5 is coming our way this Halloween.
I love good horror, and I love being scared. The original Halloween is one of my favorite movies. It contains something horror movies have lacked for years now: subtlety. Some of the movie’s scariest moments were when Michael Myers was just eerily starring at Laurie Strode from behind a bed sheet caught in the wind, or Michael stepping out from behind a hedge.
That’s why the trailer for The Strangers excited me. The movie’s plot centers on a couple, played by Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman, who retreats to a secluded vacation home after a friend’s wedding. Things go awry when a mysterious girl appears at the door asking for “Tamara,” and three murderous strangers begin stalking the pair. It looked like a good old-fashioned slasher flick, reminiscent of Halloween or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — but the actual movie was something entirely different.
The good
The villains. Yes! The killers are simply people in masks. That’s what I like to see. The main baddie, credited only as “The Man in the Mask,” is dressed in a bad suit and wields an ax.
Old-fashioned scares. In my book, sometimes there is nothing scarier than a knock on the door at four in the morning.
My favorite shot in the whole movie. Watch the trailer. There is a fairly wide shot of the inside of the house: Tyler stands in the middle of the room contemplating what to do next, while The Man in the Mask slowly walks out from a doorway in the background, and just stands there. There is no music. No cheap scare. It’s the scariest thing I’ve seen in a horror movie in a while, and the scene is even better in the theater.
The bad
The villains. While The Man in the Mask is a cool villain for a modern slasher flick, he is still really just a combination of the white-faced Myers and the fleshy exterior of Leatherface, and unfortunately, the baddies are just as slow and very often, just as dumb. The thing is that they are neither evil personified or horribly inbred. So what’s their excuse?
The script. First-time writer/director Bryan Bertino knows the rules of horror films and plays by them. How unfortunate! The first ten minutes are nothing more than a tacked-on-the-back story, so we can care about the people who could get murdered at any moment. The thing is, we don’t care at all: The main characters are characters, only targets. That, and I still have whiplash from driving over so many plot holes.
The ending. In one way, it defies logic. In another it makes sense: It just leaves with you a bad feeling in your stomach.
The ugly
The villains. Come on, The Man in the Mask! I have never seen more half-assed bad guys. Half of the “scares” are when a main character sees one of the three villains, looks away, looks back, and they’re gone. It worked the first few times. After the umpteenth time, it just got ridiculous.
Overall rating: D+
From its idiotic script to its faux-indie shaky-cam direction, it is simply a bad film that can be thrown into the same trash bin as most of today’s horror films.