STUDIO: Universal
RELEASE DATE: October 21, 2008
STARRING: Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler
WRITTEN BY: Bryan Bertino
DIRECTED BY: Bryan Bertino
FEATURES: The Elements Of Terror
Deleted Scenes
Blu-ray Live Enabled

"What you are about to see is inspired by true events. According to the F.B.I. there are an estimated 1.4 million violent crimes in America each year. On the night of February 11, 2005 Kristen McKay and James Hoyt went to a friend's wedding reception and then returned to the Hoyt family's summer home. The brutal events that took place there are still not entirely known."

The Strangers got a bum rap in theaters. Audiences were unsure what exactly the film was due to some misguided marketing that made it look like a Saw sequel and I think critics were too quick to pounce on it, as the torture porn genre has left them understandably exhausted. I'll admit that I'm a horror nut, but I'm also the genre's toughest critic. Like a lot of horror fans, I've seen it all and I'm tired of derivative crap. However, I feel like that exhaustion has led to the dismissal of some quality films. The Strangers is a quality film. Is it a masterpiece? No. A horrendous ending, some audience manipulation when believability would have worked better, and a questionable moral center to the entire piece keeps it from being such, but writer/director Bryan Bertino does so much right with his debut that it's a shame more people didn't catch on to the quality in The Strangers. They will over time.

The well cast and interesting Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler star as James and Kristen, a couple who we meet on a particularly bad night. After a wedding, where things clearly didn't go as planned, the beautiful couple returns to a family home far from civilization. The house is clearly set up for a post-proposal celebration that will likely never happen. Immediately and without gore or traditional horror techniques, the audience is set on edge. What happened? Why has a happy occasion turned to tears? And I love the way Bertino uses hushed dialogue in these opening scenes, getting the audience on the edge of their seat and then smacking them in the face. The smack comes with a loud (and truly butt-tightening in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1) knock on the door at 4am. Would you answer? A girl is on the step asking "Is Tamara home?" At first, it's easy to write off as kids being bored kids, but that soon changes as three very creepily masked teenagers torment our hero and heroine for the rest of the long, long night.

Is there something morally corrupt about making a true story about people being tormented and tortured for pure amusement? Arguably. And if your threshold for that kind of thing is low, don't let The Strangers in. But are Halloween or Texas Chainsaw Massacre much more than that? I guess what I'm saying is that there's a part of me that agrees that the very concept of a movie like The Strangers - watching evil acts done to good people in the comfort of your own home and in gorgeous 1080p - could understandably make your stomach turn. Know what you're getting into.

Once you do, there's a technical expertise going on in The Strangers that hasn't often been seen in the thriller genre of late and that's why it works. Most importantly, Bertino doesn't fill his script with ridiculous exclamations like "Why are you doing this?!?" Instead he allows a large majority of the action in The Strangers to happen in silence, cut by an axe going through a door or poor Liv exercising her lungs. More often than not, it's the unbelievable dialogue that pulls a movie out of the realm of believability, particularly in horror, where what people say is usually an afterthought to what they do in the writing process. If you were fighting for your life, you'd probably avoid monologues and cliched speeches. It adds a sense of realism to the first two acts of the film that can't be underestimated. And, thankfully, The Strangers never descends into gore. There's death, but it's practically PG-13 rated. Don't go expecting a bloodbath.

Only a few minor decisions here and there keep The Strangers back from true greatness. At one point, before the chaos, Speedman's James leaves to buy cigarettes and we don't go with him to the store. It dawned on me that perhaps we would never go with him and have the forced perspective of one character in one house, never knowing anything that she didn't know. Bertino almost commits to that but he pulls back. If he had put us right in her shoes, it might have elevated The Strangers to a different level of terror. There are also a few scenes here and there where the teenagers are seen in the background a la Michael Myers in Halloween. It's hair-raising to be sure, but it also has the feeling of actors in a movie trying to scare the audience instead of realistic behavior. There's also a ridiculous final shot that feels pulled from another film it's so over-the-top and unnecessary. All of these criticisms might sound minor, but it's things like this that turn what could have been a four-star film into a three-star one.

The Blu-Ray presentation is similarly three stars in quality. I'm tired of EVERY single horror movie coming out UNRATED! When will a director stand up and say "um, no, I cut that gore for a reason and it wasn't just for a rating." It undermines the artistic integrity of a genre already accused of not having much of it. And the lack of special features on the Blu-Ray release for The Strangers is disappointing. I've interviewed Bertino and he's a well-spoken, interesting dude, something that comes across in the 10-minute featurette. Why no commentary? And TWO deleted scenes? Come on. They were both wisely deleted (it's just some material at the wedding that isn't necessary and a conversation with James and Kristen from later in the film that looks like it was shot with a webcam the quality is so bad), so I suppose it's good that they weren't cut back into the movie, but it would have been nice to learn more about the process behind this underrated horror flick, one that will stand the test of time much more than a lot of the junk this genre has seen in the last few years.