Night Swim isn’t looking so bad right about now. The Strangers: Chapter One is directed by Renny Harlin and tells the story of a couple being terrorized by a trio of masked stalkers. I was actually looking forward to this movie. The trailer I thought was solid and I liked the tone they were going for with this movie. However, some things began to worry me. For one, the trailer looked like a shot for shot remake of the original movie which I hate. Second, the trailer looked like it showed the entire movie (I was right). And lastly, they announced a trilogy for this franchise before we even laid eyes on one of these movies. They did this with Halloween and it kind of worked kind of didn’t, they did this with The Exorcist and so far they’re 0-1 with the other two are up in the air. And now we have The Strangers trilogy which after watching this first one, they better thank everything holy they shot all three of these back to back.
The Strangers: Chapter 1 was honestly really bad. This movie was a carbon copy of the original with very little added to this story and the final result is setting up two more movies that you cannot pay me to care about. As for positives with this movie…there are two sequences in the movie that I thought were pretty effective. One of them has the characters crawling under the house to get away from the killers and I thought that sequence was very intense. Another one has the main girl hiding in the forest and I thought that was suspenseful. There were one or two jump scares that were effective because they didn’t have an annoying sound accompanying them (unlike 95% of the other ones). My final positive is that I liked this interpretation of The Strangers in terms of the killers. They reminded me of how Jason is portrayed in the 2009 remake.
Unfortunately this all goes to waste by the end of the movie. Before I get into my major issues with this movie, the biggest thing I cannot stand about this movie is how lazy it is. This movie commits the cardinal sin of being pretty much a shot for shot remake of the original and I cannot stand when remakes do this.
There are literally zero surprises in this movie. If you have seen the original movie, you can predict every single thing that happens in this movie, say for maybe the last two minutes of the movie and that’s only because they’re setting up more movies. However, with that in mind, I was able to predict the ending of this movie and how they were going to set up the next movie. Moving away from that, the acting in this movie is rather atrocious. The main girl is one of the girls from Riverdale and you can absolutely tell that’s where she came from because YIKES is she bad in this movie. The boyfriend isn’t as bad but he still has some rough lines.
The violence of this movie is so tame. You could’ve had this be PG-13 and it would make no difference. The writing of this movie is rather shocking. The characters in this movie are dumber than the ones in the original. Let me say that again…the characters in this movie are DUMBER than the ones in the original. I don’t even know how that’s humanly possible but they achieved it.
There are two instances of stupidity in this movie that made me want to rip my hair out of my head. One of these instances was so stupid that everyone in my theater was shouting at the screen and broke out in laughter when something happened to the person making this horrible decision.
Lastly…there is a post credit scene to this movie that sets up the next movie that was so laughably bad that I bursted out laughing in the theater. Guys I have nothing else to add to this. This movie was a waste of resources and a waste of what could’ve been something promising. I’m mildly optimistic for the next one but if the next one is as bad as this, I’m definitely not watching the third one.
Final Score: 3.5/10