11/11/2022 0 Comments Fiwi place hotelThere are some ominous uses of blocking with the killers that work, and some instances that undercut the jump scare convention which should be praised.īut the good doesn’t amount to much and is often buried under a mound of cliches and plot holes. One sequence involving a pool and the song “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is especially well executed. There are minor sequences of note when it comes to assessing the tense mood that the film is going for. The Strangers: Prey at Night is not entirely dreadful. I have a feeling that Johannes Roberts, Bryan Bertino, and Ben Ketai missed that subtext when they watched Haneke’s film. The irony is that the film’s inspiration, the aforementioned Funny Games, works because it is a commentary on the audience fascination with on-screen violence. The camera revels in the grotesque outcomes of their machinations.Īs a result, it is a struggle to find any reason to be surveying the violence in the first place. The film may be tricking us into thinking that it wants us to align ourselves with the family, but clearly the filmmakers care more about the murderers. This is part and parcel to the issue of Prey at Night. At least it is intriguing that the killers seem to have no motive. In a way, the film provides more characterization in the killers than in the victims. It is all a contrived way of isolating the four people so that they can be stalked and killed one by one. The mother (Hendricks) sympathizes with this rebellion, and both she and her husband (Henderson) take pains to show their love to their daughter in spite of the daughter’s transgressions.Īnd the son (Pullman). She doesn’t inhale, though, because it is really just a show. The daughter (Madison) is being shipped off to boarding school because of her bad behavior. Prey at Night begins with a setup that gives us superficial backstory on the family. But in trying to counter its predecessor with a unique twist, it actually bends back towards tired slasher conventions. Without divulging too many spoilers, this sequel attempts to have the same grim nihilism. But at least in the first Strangers film the brutal nihilism is used to upend certain conventions of the slasher genre, particularly with that film’s end result. This is not to disparage the films, if that is what you are after in a horror picture. The masked figures play tricks on the family before beginning to kill them off.īoth Strangers films exercise a sadistic level of nihilism to provide their entertainment. The victims, in this case a nuclear family of four (Christina Hendricks, Martin Henderson, Bailee Madison, and Lewis Pullman), are stalked quietly and forebodingly by three masked figures. Much of Prey at Night is a rehash of the first film. It is a film that both relies on the weight of its predecessor to get people to see it and expects us to ignore that first film when it attempts the same template. Now, 10 years later, we are granted with another high concept sequel, The Strangers: Prey at Night. eerie masks and a crude smiley face logo). The 2008 horror film The Strangers is, at its essence, a ripoff of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games with a high concept marketing angle (i.e.
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