"The Strangers - Chapter 2" was filmed alongside last year's "Chapter 1," with "Chapter 3" still unreleased. The interwebs tells me all three were to be released in 2024, so I don't know what happened there. I have no idea what happened behind the scene, and to not commit a critic-sin, I can't say what happens onscreen. What I can say is that this sequel is bad. Awful. Dreadful. Boring. Dumb. Bloated. And perhaps most damning, completely unscary. I sat in a mostly empty theater stone-faced, unflinching to any of the myriad of alleged jump-scares, growing increasingly annoyed at just how monotonous the whole production ended up being. It's not merely just bad, but artistically inert, unable to even become so-bad-it's-good.
This is the worst kind of film, so passionateless and mechanical, showcasing just what a hack director Renny Harlin, once a decently respected director, has become. This is the man who made what is probably Hollywood's second best shark movie for crying out loud!
A part of me would love to hate this film, but it is so ruthlessly hollow an experience that I just couldn't muster up any emotions. Like a VHS without any film, this is an empty husk where a movie should be.
The plot, sure, we can get that out of the way. The sole survivor of the first chapter, Maya (Madelaine Petsch) is recovering in a nearby hospital. She wakes to learn her fiance Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), who was also attacked, was not so lucky. This should be a touching moment, but at least he doesn't have to suffer through this dreck.
Maya would likely have lived a normal life then, but then the local sheriff and Deputy (Richard Brake and Pedro Leandro, respectively), have to go and yap about the girl who lived in the local diner. (A place so busy you'd swear it's the town's only restaurant.) Does that mean the three killers also frequent the eatery? Bold of you to assume such basic questions would be answered.
Because the police don't bother having a guard to protect a woman who barely survived a deadly home invasion, that very night, the masked killers swarm the hospital, which is multiple stories large yet we only ever see, like, four people working there. She's awake because of a nightmare, then her phone rings, an unknown number. She answers it, only to hear one of the masked assailants on the other end. Then she hears a voice outside her room, a man who sounds to be being killed. What's a negative one-dimensional horror movie heroine to do? Call the cops? Pull the fire alarm? No silly, she tries to escape. Of course moments later, only after the power is cut does she try and call. Naturally, there's no cell reception then. Frustrated? Just wait til it happens again!
Anyway, Maya desperately tries to hide somewhere in the hospital, eventually slipping into the morgue. She squeezes next to a dead body in one of those freezer things just before the masked man with the ax walks in. He knows she's somewhere and begins checking each of the cold corpse coolers when he stops, staring directly at the one she's in. He pauses only because the filmmakers mistook idiocy for tension, but then a hapless nurse walks in, who's quickly chopped down. She leaves once the man in the burlap sack goes to hide the body, but I kept thinking to myself, what a great hiding place! She gets to lie down, it's not too hot PLUS she gets a little vent to peak out of, so she can scope the room for when the cops or whoever come by. That, and the killers would no doubt not check a room they already cleared, especially with those tempting woods right next door just begging horror movie characters to run around in.
Maya (of course) leaves and escapes outside into the rainy night, no doubt seduced by the idea of being in a wet hospital gown in the dark. Some plot happens and she flags down nurse Danica (Brooke Johnson) and her friend, who say she's safe now and that she can stay with them. Never did it occur to her to try and figure out how one of her patients escaped, but there I go again with my logic. Maya has a panic attack once they pick up two men, thinking these four are the killers. (Nevermind the fact that there are only three murderers but whatever.)
So like anyone with stitches would do, she steals a knife, boots and some medical supplies and lunges out of a moving vehicle. The foursome pull over and try to find her, but she's just hidden herself far too well behind a dying log to be spotted. Hide-and-seekers just hate to see her coming.
More plot happens and then, and I'm not making this up, the masked ax man lets out a wild boar, who quicky finds and attacks her. Why he didn't follow the animal is never explained. (I'm holding out that they'll answer this mystery in part 3.)
Then after some more plot, and Maya awakes in the care of Danica from before, her wounds cleaned and stitched, but what's this? Why, she's in her panties, so cue scenes of her hardly clothed buttocks, just for fun. In a peverse way, it's the best part of the movie. A sad, depressingly lifeless movie that is so relentlessly unexciting that it could inspire someone who has never read anything in their life to pick up a book and go to town.
One time had to get my license from the DMV, where I waited outside in the chilly November weather: it was more exciting than this. It doesn't help that the ending, what should be the "big reveal," is so poorly handled that you have no idea the "who's" and "why's." With its hour and a half or so runtime feels like three, "The Strangers - Chapter 2" is a cinematic dead-zone.
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