Director: Renny Harlin
Stars: Madelaine Petsch, Richard Brake, Gabriel Basso
Like many of us, I imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about consequences and accountability of late. It’s hard not to, as we’re so inundated with evidence of abuse and tyranny both historic and contemporary, with perpetrators who sit atop golden thrones, still acting with impunity. In a fascist police state like America, for example, who can you turn to when it is your supposed protectors also represent the greater threat?
It’s hard to believe these prescient concerns were in the minds of screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland when they were conceiving The Strangers reboot some years ago, now stretched out into three movies, concluding here with Chapter 3. If we’re being exceedingly charitable, it could be viewed as an intentional state-of-the-union address; a reflection of a country which turns a blind eye to terrible crimes happening in plain sight, where the horrors are okay so long as they’re happening to outsiders. Where morality has been supressed and subsumed by So. Many. Wrongdoings. It almost seems purposeful.
Except that in all other respects The Strangers Chapter 3 is so quantifiably frustrating and stupid that being exceedingly charitable doesn’t come easy. Which leaves me pondering just who’s accountable for this colossal franchise fuck-up…?
Things were looking up! After a maudlin-paced first act, things improved considerably for The Strangers Chapter 2, mostly whenever it streamlined the narrative down to Maya’s (Madelaine Petsch) fight for survival as she was pursued hither and thither across the rural Oregon ‘burb of Venus in what amounted to a 90 minute chase movie. There was even a modicum of character development. It was kind of fascinating watching her progress from a relentlessly sniveling human foetus into a semi-competent individual. That these three chapters were filmed together makes the pointed regression that takes place here all the more baffling. It’s one step forward, two steps back as we watch her retreat into the helpless and passive modes that defined her actions at the story’s beginning. Maya the cowed bystander no longer convinces.
The worst thing about Chapter 2 was the sudden inclusion of spurious flashbacks to feather in some lore for the trio of masked menaces that are attacking our weathered Final Girl. It’s been labored on before, but most of the time with horror villains, the less you know the better, and the impulse to explain ‘the Strangers’ is just as misguided as efforts to psychoanalyse Michael Myers. That’s not ultimately where such villains’ power comes from. Chapter 3 continues these asides, bridging the gaps and trying, very flimsily, to explain away the townsfolk’s mass capitulation to the carnage going on around them. It is laughably weak material (while efforts to de-age Richard Brake’s grinning sheriff are… distractingly rubbery).
But this time around it isn’t the weakest element of the tale. There are numerous contenders. Renny Harlin continues to stage a lot of the methodically paced (i.e. slow) action handsomely, especially for pretty bog-standard digital fare, but any sombre elegance harking back to Bryan Bertino’s original is undercut by the litany of Bad Decisions being made, mostly by Maya. The Strangers Chapter 3 includes some of the most face-slappingly ludicrous lapses in common sense or basic logic that I’ve seen in anything. From one of the worst cases of “look at the road!” driving, to the limp efforts to have us believe that Maya might switch sides and team-up with her attackers. After all she’s been through the notion doesn’t hold water for a moment, even with the threat of being hurled into a woodchipper.
Product placement also becomes something of a mill around this movie’s neck. You might cynically say that it’s a fact of Hollywood filmmaking. A necessary evil. But there are ways of doing these things subtly. Framing an entire conversation around a Budweiser logo isn’t one of them, nor is building an entire scene around a pun name-checking a bottle of Bullet Bourbon that the two characters involved then settle down to drink from. It’s galling to say the least. As before, the movie works best when it’s saying the least. The impulse to keep dialogue to a minimum is laudable, but not at the expense of this much reason or credibility. The driving motivations behind nearly every scene are decidedly spurious, irrespective of who’s on screen.
Efforts to belatedly add to the mixture don’t pay any real dividends. Maya’s sister Debbie (Rachel Shenton) and her partner Howard (George Young) finally arrive in Venus to check up on her, but their investigations mainly repeat old ground and serve to give Richard Brake a fraction more to do. Conceived and filmed as a whole (with some hurried reshoots after the release of act one), it’s quite possible that the extended breaks between episodes have weakened Harlin’s creation. Chapter 3 suffers from stilted momentum that these new elements only exacerbate. It may well play better as a four and a half hour marathon at home but, frankly, that’s applying an awful lot of optimism.
Because after so much stalking, after so much slashing (this one has the highest kill count, until it’s all laughably meaningless), does Chapter 3 stick the landing? No, it does not. The things it rends it’s hands explaining don’t matter a jot, because an equal amount is left inexplicable or frustratingly unknown, so these endeavours become totally arbitrary (hope you’re not invested in who Dollface is…).
I ultimately got stuck on Maya’s penultimate(?) line of dialogue, regarding a shotgun. “It’s empty”.
Yeah. After everything, it is.
The Lost Highway Hotel 