The Strangers: Prey at Night (2018)
Directed by Johannes Roberts
A family's road trip takes a dangerous turn when they arrive at a secluded mobile home park to stay with some relatives and find it mysteriously deserted. Under the cover of darkness, three masked killers pay them a visit to test the family's every limit as they struggle to survive.
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And with Roberts being no Steven Spielberg when it comes to crafting suspense stemming from an anonymous figure trying to kill our main character (as Spielberg superbly did in "Duel"), this ends up simply being nothing more than what we've seen countless times before.
Horror fans will delight in recognizing homages to suspense/horror tales, among them the end of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," the monster truck from Steven Spielberg's "Duel," composer Adrian Johnston's tribute to John Carpenter's "Halloween," and the visual nod to "The Exorcist."
Also, this may not be something most folks will ever see, but prior to my screening of The Strangers: Prey at Night , we saw a quick intro from Roberts, who revealed that the biggest influence on him while working on this project was John Carpenter, including certain iconic movies from the Master of Horror’s filmography such as The Fog , Christine , and (of course) Halloween .
Subtle hints Hammer-to-the-head homages evoke Halloween ’s “The Shape,” roll with The Fog and grind Christine ’s gears in an atmospherically overt love-letter to Carpenter that Roberts signs in blood.
Adrian Johnston’s ( I Am Not a Serial Killer ) electronic score, reminiscent of John Carpenter’s classic compositions for Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York , is terrific, but it is also frequently undercut by a number of 1980s pop songs, the film oddly inserting them at a number of inopportune moments diluting the inherent tension of the situation substantially.
But as it turns out he has two helpers, Dollface (Emma Bellomy) and Pin-Up Girl (Lea Enslin), both of whom wear plastic masks similar to the one popularized in “V for Vendetta.”
The first two look like female variations on the masked harlequin of “V for Vendetta”; the latter is the film’s Leatherface mascot — he wears an executioner’s hood of burlap and is given to “enigmatic” silences, though they feel so hollow I’m tempted to say there’s such a thing as inexpressive masked-psycho-killer acting, and this is a prime example of it.
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Christina Hendricks (2016's " The Neon Demon ") and Martin Henderson (2015's " Everest ") are thoroughly believable as parents Cindy and Mike, at their wits' end with turbulent daughter Kinsey and willing to do whatever is needed to save her from the path she's heading down.