Someone's at the Door

In a nice bit of "counter-programming" to the Sex and the City feature film, the new horror movie The Strangers was released this weekend. Almost always willing to give a horror movie a chance, I pulled some fans of the genre together and we checked it out on Saturday. All of walked out with the same opinion: very good, but not great. And the reasons we all felt this way were pretty identical, as well.

In the plus column, this is the most suspenseful horror movie that's been made in years. The director of this film is new on the scene, but man, does he understand how to make a horror movie. Many, many times throughout the movie, my hairs were standing on end. At one point, I realized my neck was actually hurting from holding in all this tension and pulling up in my chair.

Best of all, the scares in this movie are almost never cheap. In the moments when something suddenly jumps out for a surprise, it always seems to come as the punctuation on a longer sequence of suspended tension. You just keep winding up and winding up, and you know something's going to happen, and then BAM!!! You jump anyway, and you can't blame the filmmakers for taking you off-guard for a cheap scare -- you walked right into it.

In short, I applaud the technique of the director.

However, the same man is also the writer, and here he fails on several counts. For a man who seems clearly to have seen plenty of horror movies in his time, he sure has his characters make some dumb decisions. I mean, dumb even by the standards these movies often employ. Everyone I went with had a different logic point or two that bothered them, but we were all bothered by something.

"You've got time to change clothes, but you don't put on shoes?"

"You decide to split up now?"

And so forth.

But more annoyingly, in my opinion, is the opening of the movie. A narrator sets the scene, and in doing so, strongly hints at what the end of the film is going to be. And then the movie actually starts with a flash-forward of the setting at the end of the story. Now you basically know what the end of the movie is going to be. Which I suppose is then even more of a testament to the directing, because the tension the film goes on to create is enormous, despite having given everything away in the first three minutes.

The writing isn't all bad, though. The two main characters have an interesting relationship that's already on shaky ground before the "Strangers" come into their lives. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman manage to endow these characters with a sense of roundedness that you don't always get from victims lined up for the meat grinder.

Still, bad, bad decision about that opening, and a few too many "you don't really want to survive this situation, do you?" decisions by the characters. Call it absolutely A+ suspense, counterbalanced with maybe C grade plotting. Tipping the balance in favor of all of us having such a fun ride in spite of the flaws, and I'm going to rate this movie a B+.