They Don't Need A Reason: The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)

The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024)

Rating: *1/2

Starring: Madelaine Petsch, Ryan Bown, Matus Lajcak

The way I see it, the most important thing to remember about remaking a movie is to tell the story of the original through a different set of eyes. Find the best parts that people love about the source material, keep them and then come up with something familiar yet original around it. The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) may have missed a note or two about this.

Couple Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) were driving to Seattle for a job interview when their car broke down, forcing them to stay overnight at an AirBnB. The two talk and cuddle, think about what the future holds for their relationship, kiss, have dinner, all of the sugar you'd expect a happy couple does. The diabetes is soon interrupted by knocks on the door and a figure in the shadows asking for someone named "Tamara". When they answered no one of that name lives there, the figure leaves and everything seems alright. For a while.

When Ryan decided to ride back to town and check up on the garage that's fixing their car, Maya is left alone to chill until she started hearing creepy lullabies being hummed somewhere, as well as getting the gooseflesh after spotting more shadowy figures lurking about. It isn't long then that all the eerie and crazy shit begins to happen upon her and her lover as three masked figures prowl the house, playing a demented game of cat-and-mouse with murder in mind.

Admittedly, The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) does look easy on the eyes in terms of visual quality and production but, sadly, that is all I could say that this movie did right as everything else is a real misfire; for one, the new main couple feels cheap for how thinly they're written, lacking any depth or relatable flaws to help raise the stakes once the masked goons start attacking them. We see them get terrorized and maybe feel a little scared for them, but it just doesn't have a hard enough gut punch to make their predicament distressing. Petsch and Gutierrez did give their all to play their roles with a tad more spark to them, but the effort just wasn't enough to effectively work a thin script and we're basically left with a caricature of a doomed horror movie couple.

As for the slasher attack itself, The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024) is more or less a loose, beat for beat retread of the original movie's home invasion assault with minor differences. We see the couple run and the strangers making chase. Ryan finds a weapon only to kill someone by accident. The two then getting split up during the chaos only to be hunted down and brought back to the AirBnB for a recreation of the iconic final scene where the strangers stab them with a knife. The film try spicing things up by setting most of the action out in the woods and have the strangers act more like hunters looking for prey than creeps toying with their victims, but it also made the mistake of building potential suspects by introducing a nearby town full of creepy townies who eye the unmarried couple as if the two are conjoined in the arse. With this, the creep factor is just gone as there's no lingering mystery to who could be behind the masks as we're now provided a small community full of them, killing off the scare tactics of a random house attack and setting the plot back to tired horror trope of unwelcoming small towns.

And that's what's frustrating about The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024); it has the opportunity to try a different angle towards the titular murderous trio and their killing spree, but the film would rather play safe and retell the same movie with nearly nothing new added. It lacks life or dread. It's tired and recycled. The whole thing is just dull. A beautifully shot yet dull backwoods slasher. Hopefully Chapter 2 and Chapter 3, which are supposed to be released either later this year or at the next, would do better.

Bodycount:

1 male hacked to death with an axe

1 male shot on the head with a shotgun

1 male knifed in the gut, bled to death

Total: 3