The Strangers: Prey At Night (2018) Review

A sequel to a beloved horror movie made 10 years ago.  I'm sure nothing will go wrong.

A family of four is on their way to drop rebellious teenager Kinsey (Bailee Madison) off at boarding school.  They stop to spend a night with some relatives who own a resort-trailer park.  But after finding their relatives dead, the family is forced to fight for their lives as they are attacked by a group of three masked strangers.  Will any of the family make it out of the trailer park alive.  And if they do, will they be in one piece?

What Works:

The strongest aspect of this movie is the first act.  The family dynamic is interesting.  We get a classic, but relatable, sibling rivalry.  Parent's who are at their whit's end.  And a bratty teenage daughter.  It's all a great set-up for what I expected to happen: a dysfunctional family learning to work together to survive.  That's not what we end up getting, but the set-up works.  Plus the first act does a good job at building the suspense.  Unfortunately this suspense does not pay off.

The only other positive I have is one death in particular, which takes place at a swimming pool.  It comes off funnier than it should, but hey, it was at least memorable.  

What Sucks:

This movie is just dumb.  It doesn't feel like a sequel to The Strangers.  In the original, the killers took their sweet time.  They messed around with Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman.  They toyed with them, in no rush to kill them.  That is not the case here.  The killers waste no time in stacking up the bodies.  There isn't much toying around.  This wouldn't be a massive problem if the kills were at least memorable.  Besides the one at the swimming pool, they aren't really.

The main characters are also dumb.  The family makes so many bad decisions, I could feel the audience getting frustrated.  Most people could have survived this situation, but the family is a bunch of idiots.

Prey At Night also feels like it rips off better movies.  There are a bunch of sequences that are blatantly taken from others movies such as Scream and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.    It's like the person who wrote this script had no original ideas.  It's not that hard a movie to pull off.  Trap a family in a trailer and force them to try and find a way out as the killers cut off every means of escape.  Instead, the family splits up early on, and spends the rest of the movie running around the park, trying to reunite.  It's, simply put, dumb, and a waste of potential.

One final aspect that I hated was the cinematography.  The original movie had several wide shots that had creepy imagery happening in the background.  It was fantastic cinematography and really unsettling.  The cinematography in this movie is much more fluid and overuses the zoom.  It's really obnoxious and several steps backwards from the original movie.

Verdict:

The Strangers: Prey At Night can't you see, you're just not the movie for me.  What a disappointment.  If you're a fan of the original, skip this one.  It doesn't even feel like a sequel to The Strangers.  It just feels like a generic slasher movie with the killers from The Strangers.  It's the worst movie I have seen in theaters so far this year.  The Stranger: Prey At Night does not have it going on.

 3/10: Dumb