'The Strangers: Chapter 3' Struggles to Salvage a Misjudged Trilogy

It’s hard to fathom a less successful and more arbitrary trilogy than Renny Harlin’s recent Strangers reboot, a tri-pronged story which struggled to summon a single film’s worth of incident. Misunderstanding everything that made Bryan Bertino’s original so scary and dashing the general rules of horror filmmaking to boot, Harlin has succeeded only in running the franchise into the ground for the foreseeable future. But give the films one thing: each is substantially better than the last. Given what we’re working with, though, that’s a terrifically grim margin.

Head-Scratching Trilogy Comes to Confounding Conclusion

The Strangers: Chapter 3, the fifth film in the franchise, picks up where last September’s Chapter 2 left off. After slaying Pin-Up Girl (Emma Horvath), Maya (Madelaine Petsch, too good for this material) sets off into the woods with Scarecrow (Gabriel Basso, recently up to much better things in A House of Dynamite) and Dollface (Ella Bruccoleri) in hot pursuit. If you missed the previous two movies, Maya’s boyfriend was killed by the Strangers, who then spent the entire second movie pursuing her through the woods. Now you’re caught up. Part three is an improvement over its predecessors only because there is more happening here than in the last movies, which were a stifling bore. This one is a bore, but not quite so stifling. Still, all three of these movies could and should have been condensed into a two-minute YouTube reel.

Harlin commits the movie’s worst sin early on by unmasking the villains, revealing both to be anodyne, model-ish looking youth who are designated as small town folk due to their love of flannel. There’s nothing clever done with this turn — something that could be said of all three movies — and the picture loses any pretense of fright once the villains are unmasked and begin gabbing their way through an inane conspiracy storyline that’s ripped from the worst TexasChainsaw Massacre sequels. It goes against everything that made The Strangers so scary, which would be a crushing disappointment if Harlin hadn’t already spent two previous films demonstrating that he not only knows nothing of what makes the franchise work, but does not even grasp how the horror genre operates. At times, the director seems to willfully misunderstand the material.

Franchise's Future Appears Bleak

Though there is quite a bit of action and bloodshed on the way to an utterly contemptible conclusion, all of it is sloppily staged and frequently embellished with risible digital effects. It’s actually shocking how poor the technicals are here, with the visuals often resembling something made for the Syfy Channel. Its release on the big screen, where it looks unconscionably shoddy, is a superfluous commercial for its streaming release; Chapter 1 took just under $50 million worldwide, while Chapter 2 topped out at $21M. This one looks unlikely to clear $10M, and for good reason. These are three of the most worthless horror films in recent history. It would be a treat to see the series rebooted again by a talented, committed filmmaker; but barring that, it’s best if this franchise stays dead.