The Strangers – Chapter 3 Review feedzy_import_tag

The Strangers – Chapter 3 is in theaters now.

There was a moment while watching The Strangers – Chapter 3 that I realized there really was just nothing going on under the hood. Not only in terms of this movie, but of this entire Renny Harlin-directed trilogy. Despite comprising over four hours worth of story over three installments following the same protagonist, very little has been narratively accomplished, and no core ideas have been thematically clarified. This realization came to me during a scene where Maya, our hero played by Madelaine Petsch, witnesses the main antagonist viciously murder someone she should theoretically care about. But she has zero reaction whatsoever. No tears, no anguished screams of “No!” or “How could you?”, just a blank stare as yet another one-note character is snuffed out in this exasperating excuse for a trilogy.

At the end of Chapter 2, Maya managed to kill Pin-Up Girl, one of the three main villains. Those villains would be the Strangers in question, a group of masked serial killers who like to knock on doors and chop up people with axes. Scarecrow, the leader and only male of the group, ended the last movie looking pretty upset about this turn of events, so you would think this movie would involve Maya and him speeding towards a thrilling battle to the death, right? Well, no, actually, that’s not what happens at all.

In fact, the first meeting between Maya and her main enemy involves him finally being unmasked, as they have a surprisingly calm conversation inside a chapel and acknowledge that they’ve each killed someone the other one cared for (Maya’s fiancé Ryan bit the dust at the end of Chapter 1). Scarecrow tells Maya to leave town, but this is a horror movie, so instead of doing the sensible thing, Maya sticks around for one more go-around with the bad guys before we’re finally free of this nonsense.

Setting aside that Maya has a perfectly good escape vehicle that she unceremoniously wrecks by not paying attention while she’s driving (really), or that the body count across three movies has gotten so high that you would think this town would warrant being declared a national emergency, there is simply nothing left to do with these characters within the scenario they’ve been established in. But Harlin and screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland seem to know this, which is why The Strangers – Chapter 3 does involve a fresh conceit, that being that Maya is recaptured almost immediately after leaving the chapel since Scarecrow and Dollface have plans to turn Maya into the new Pin-Up Girl. You know, because when you kill a serial killer, you become a serial killer. That’s how it works, right?

At the very least, it’s the first novel spin this trilogy has had on the Strangers premise, but it doesn’t register because the characters involved are too thin to support it. In my review of Chapter 2, I remarked that Maya had become somewhat more textured by her experiences in the first two films, but Chapter 3 goes out of its way to give her nothing to do. She has virtually no dialogue outside of her first and final scenes, and while Madelaine Petsch felt engaged in the middle film when she was fighting and fleeing from her tormentors, here she spends almost the entire movie with a vacant expression that’s not informed by what’s going on around her. It’s as if everyone involved had grown tired of the whole deal after filming three films back-to-back, and while that’s certainly understandable, it doesn’t excuse the movie being as boring to watch as it appears to have been to make.

That lack of creative investment spills into every aspect of the production. New characters are introduced and promptly dispatched before we learn anything about them. Characters from the first two films who had Obviously Evil signposts over their heads are revealed to be obviously evil. There are more backstory scenes showing us the origins of Scarecrow and Dollface that don’t have any real bearing on the present day events. Even the kills in this one feel marred by fatigue. If you’re not going to bother getting us emotionally invested in your characters before killing them, at least make the kills appreciably gory so they can be enjoyed on a popcorn entertainment level. But this movie is weirdly low on blood despite having an absurd number of deaths; you’ll find much more blood (and a much better movie) if you check out Sam Raimi’s Send Help this weekend instead.

I don’t like slamming movies this way. I go into every one hoping it’s something I can enjoy on some level, and I’m an avid fan of the horror genre. But this is the worst installment in a trilogy of movies that I sincerely have nothing substantially positive to say about. While I was expecting a movie lacking in ambition or nuance based on its predecessors, Harlin and company have turned in a finale that is bereft of urgency, tension, or even baseline thrills. The Strangers – Chapter 3 may not be the worst horror movie I’ve seen in a theater, but it might be the laziest.