Movie Reviews

2008’s The Strangers was a relatively effective horror flick. Not the best horror movie to come out that year, definitely not the worst. Ten years down the line, we are being treated to The Strangers 2: Prey At Night, which isn’t really a sequel. It’s actually just more of the same. In that sense, saying that we are being treated to a sequel, isn’t correct either. That would entail that it is a pleasant experience.

This time around, the knives and ax wielding assailants get to terrorize an unhappy family of four. Mom (Christina Hendricks) and dad (Martin Henderson), teenage son Luke (Lewis Pullman) and troubled teenage daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) are all on their way to drop off Kinsey at boarding school. Why? No idea. There are a bunch off mentions of some troubled past, but apparently the screenwriters couldn’t be bothered to work out the details on that.

During a stopover to visit their dear old uncle Marvin at an otherwise abandoned trailer park, they run into the psychopathic trio. And then there’s a lot of running, hiding, looking scared and asking why they are doing this. Oh, and stabbings. Don’t forget the stabbings.

All of this is set to the tune of Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart,’ Kim Wilde’s ‘Kids in America,’ and Air Supply’s ‘Making Love Out of Nothing at All’. Which made me ask why a bunch of times as well. Probably because the 80ies are hip again. In an ironic way of course.

On top of all that, I also wondered why the build-up was so incredibly slow, why the characters had the emotional depth of a cardboard cutout and frankly, why anyone felt they needed to make this sequel.