One of my favorite jokes is actually quite stupid. Basically the joke goes, “A man walks into a bar and says ouch.”
The joke seems special to me because unlike any other attempt at being funny, in the case of this joke, I enjoy it more that people just don’t get it. The blank stare while they wait in anticipation for the joke to climax, only to be followed by confusion at the fact that I’ve already stopped talking. Another very important component to the quality of the joke is that its amazingly short.

That is where The Strangers fails. It’s 85 minutes long and contains less meat than a guy who walks into a bar and says ouch.

I hate when things are promoted as being Inspired by True Events. It’s such a vague term that you might as well say 300 was Inspired by True Events. That includes battle wizards, 12 foot tall persian emperors, and spending a full day to build a wall of dead men for the sole purpose of crushing 1 enemy. Were the actions taken by the characters in The Strangers based on what really happened, then maybe it was less the murderers that did them in, but more a process of natural selection.

Oh look they're caught. Great job showing the end of the movie in a promo poster. Now I can avoid the 95% of the movie that lead up to that point.

In The Strangers, three people show up at a couples house, scare them a lot, and then stab them to death. What I did there is cover every single intricacy of the movie in a single sentence. I know i said i’d only talk about the stupidity found in a movie, but I’m finding it really hard to classify this as a movie. Movies should be stories, and not just a series of events that takes place.
“I walked to the mail box and sent a letter.” See that’s not a movie either, but if you can classify The Strangers as a movie then my sentence could work as one as well. We could call it The Journey.

So James (Scott Speedman) proposes to Kristen (Liv Tyler) at a friends wedding only to reject him.  You can tell shes said no by the fact that she expresses her emotions through blinking them out in Morse code.   She tells him she’s not ready, and they head off to his family cabin together where he had planned a romantic evening.  I too find my mom and dads house to be the most sensual of locals…

Around  1:30 am there is a knock at the door properly cock blocking James who had to by that point have put up with several hours of awkward blinking.  A girl at the door veiled in darkness asks if Tamara is home.  Not the creepiest of lines I might add, but since she’s hard to hear it almost sounds like she’s asking if Tamar’s home.  Random strangers in the middle of the night is one thing, but when they start bandying about Muslim sounding names it’s time to call the cops.

Rather than be alarmed at all, they decide to split up.  That would be the first time in this movie in which James decides the best thing to do in an uncomfortable and possibly dangerous situation is to leave.  Seriously though, if that hadn’t put their creeped out factor at least into code yellow, than they’re made of tougher material than me and my wife.  Maybe we can’t fully appreciate the desire for cigarettes since we don’t smoke.  But it would probably take a serious coke addiction to drive my wife to allowing me to run off to the store when there are weirdos out and about.  Even then she’d want to come with.

Sure enough when James leaves, our friend returns louder and more persistent.  Kristen plugs her phone in to charge but doesn’t make a call from it.  Even though cell phones can both charge and make calls when plugged in.  She uses the home phone to call James back and alert him, but the line goes dead.  She still doesn’t use the plugged in cell phone, to call the cops.

She’s obviously creeped out enough to grab a knife, but apparently not so much that she’s willing to keep track of the one form of communication to the outside world.  Checking the window she find a pleasant looking fellow standing there and wearing a cloth sack mask.  At that point any rational person should shit their pants.  But seeing the recently locked front door slowly open, she slowly and quietly walks towards it to peak through and find yet another creepy masked friend at the door.

By the way, the cell phone was thrown into the fireplace.  Not that she smelled it or anything, because the smell of plastic burning is reminiscent like sweet autumn hickory.

With them now obviously in the house, and Kristen backed into a huddled mass of blood and broken glass, in comes James, or as I like to call him Ol’ Doubtin’ Tommy.  ”Are you sure you saw someone staring at you through the window?” No she’s just so fucking distraught about making you look like an asshole that she’s completely imagined it.

dude she's totally faking it...

He then proceeds to do such a minimal search of the house, that he couldn’t have found a misplaced couch.  I do the same kind of search for my 2 year old daughter when we play hide and seek and I don’t actually want to find her (Sorry if you read this in a few years sweety, but it’s true. You kinda suck at Hide and Seek.)

He’s decided that it’s impossible for anyone to have been in the house.  Even though Kristen had locked the door earlier and found it opened shortly after.   Seeing that there is someone outside staring at the house, and that she doesn’t match the description of a large dude with a sack over his head, he also decides the best course of action is to not call the cops.  Instead he walks out to confront her.  Maybe i’m less of a man, but I wouldn’t have gone out there. Even had my wife demanded it.  Go see what they want? Fuck you, let the cops ask them.  That makes it a second time he leaves his girlfriend alone and defenseless by the way.

So upon returning he too finds his cell phone out of commission.  Thats when he says one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a movie.  ”I don’t understand; I checked the whole house.”   Really James?  There couldn’t be any possibility that they just didn’t happen to be in the house during your cursory inspection, but could with a such great preponderance of evidence to the fact, have entered both before and after?  I do have to give it to the Murderous Strangers though.  Man they are light on their feet.  I can’t get a glass of water in my apartment with the sound of creaking being heard throughout each room.   I can’t imagine how they pull it off in such a rustic cabin.

All is in order though.  For James has a shotgun.  He doesn’t know how to use it, and he has to scramble for the bullets, but there’s nothing to worry about.  Once you get past loading the gun its as simple as …well point and shoot.  So when Mr. Bags starts slamming through the front door with an axe, and you’re 3 feet away, and all he has to do is shoot the fucking door, he somehow misses.  I repeat, with a buck shot rifle, standing three feet away from a door in which the perpetrator is standing directly in front of, with a large fucking hole in it (courtesy of the axe that had just created it) he is somehow able to miss.

But not to worry he has a plan.  It’s actually a good plan.  Turn off the lights to a room, face the only entrance, behind a structure with your back to the wall and your gun pointed forward.  Well with the exception of shooting his brother in the face.  But hey that happens.   It is especially likely to happen when you arrive at a house and have a brick thrown at your car, find the property torn apart, and decide to nonchalantly walk into the shit storm of a situation.  Why wasn’t his brothers first reaction to call the cops, or better yet, just get the fuck out of there.  No he decides to walk right into the house and give it a tour.

It’s tragic shooting your brother in the face, but why give up your secure position?  It’s not like you’re going to have to worry about running into another brother.  How many family members can you accidentally shoot?  Even if that number is as high as 3 you’ve at least increased your odds of finding a phone on their headless bodies (Which they fail to look for on his brother.)

Rather than stay comfortable and safe inside their house with their backs to the wall and boxes full of shot gun shells at their feet, they decide to go for the tool shed and radio for help.  James decides that it is once more the best decision he can possibly make to leave his defenseless girlfriend alone, outside, surrounded by three murderers.  I guess that was the safer option.  He’s not going to try to hide her of course, even though he grew up in the house and must know every facet of it.  No, it’s best to leave her right next to the open sliding glass door, while he moves away into the dark unknown with the only means of protection at their disposal, to the room which he knows the murderers have already been in.  I’m starting to see why she said “No”.

So off he sets into the dark, with no flashlight, to stealthily make his way to the shack clad in his bright white shirt.  Kristen does her best to prepare for the worst by repeatedly covering her eyes and not wearing any shoes.  When her husband-not-to-be ends up cold cocked (slightly different than cock blocked, but in a way not really) by one of the killers, she decides a stupid plan can only work better if set upon by a person even less prepared or familiar with the environment.  She actually does get all the way to the shed, which appears to be filled with a single well lit radio, and heaping mounds of nearly empty metal pails with jangly bits of metal in them.

A bunch of stuff happens, and she’s found by the killers hiding is a broom closet with a door who’s slats are so widely separated that its almost comical to have a door there in the first place.

The two are bound to chairs, and stabbed one by one, until they’re deadish.  First James, then Kristen, then my eyeballs by my own fingers for having wasted my time watching this.

In a last ditch effort to understand what it's like to be a wife Kristen finally gets around to CLEANING THOSE GOD DAMNED FILTHY FLOORS!

In conclusion, I have to wonder not about the strangers intentions, but their methods.  Sure their brutal murder and night of scaring the shit out of people was an ultimate success.  But their night would have been disastrous had their intended victims been even remotely intelligent.  Hell they would have been ruined by a family that decides keep their cell phones in their pockets, or calls 911 when harassed in the middle of the night.  Maybe they didn’t just attack because they were home.  Maybe they did their homework and realized that they were just doing their part in evolution to “cull the herd”.  Maybe their explanation to James and Kristen regarding their reasons as “because you were home” was just overly simplified for their benefit.  They were seconds away from whipping out the Venn Diagrams.  Whatever the case may be, I say good riddance.

3 Comments »

1. i LOVED the introductory joke

   Comment by danineteen — March 20, 2010 @ 4:43 am

2. I loved the way you wrote the review. It was very good.

   Comment by reviewreader — May 30, 2010 @ 6:05 am

3. Where did you learn about this? Can you give me the source?

   Sent via Blackberry

   Comment by television fan — July 16, 2010 @ 12:36 am

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