If you’ve been living under a rock for the past six weeks, you maybe would have seen that A Quiet Place has in its own small-budget way, been devouring the box office in a similar vein as Get Out and Split did this time last year. Not exactly the premium positioning for a horror film given the amount of multi-million competition now around all through the year. All three found their audience but it wasn’t simply that people wanted to be scared, it was that all of them had something original about them, something new and fresh than your usual scary movie.
Jump forward a month or two and we have our next candidate to wear the horror crown, the sequel The Strangers: Prey at Night, but where those aforementioned broke the mold, this insipid sequel is the complete opposite. In fact, it’s one of the year’s worst.
Taking its cue from the first film, Prey at Night has a similar premise but moves the action from an isolated holiday home to a caravan site where a young family (led by parents Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) are heading for an extended break while their volatile daughter Kinsey (Bailee Madison) is sent to a local boarding school after one too many disruptions. Upon their arrival one dark night, they discover that the family they were supposed to meet have vanished and some strange goings on are afoot.
The biggest problem with Prey at Night isn’t to do with its look or feel – director Johannes Roberts adds a suitably murky and sinister atmosphere to proceedings while the score from Adrian Johnston brings back memories of some classics (and, frankly miles better) of the genre – but it’s the insipid and excruciatingly dull story that is its ultimate downfall. It’s painful at times watching these characters make the decisions they do through the film and such is their stupidity that any stakes are null and void about halfway through.
Indeed there’s never any real threat here, no malice or frightening nature to those doing the stalking and for the most part, you will feel about as scared as you would watching Peppa Pig – it really is that bad, unless of course, that particular cartoon does give you the heebie-jeebies. And what a squander of some decently talented people, none more so that Hendricks who is so wasted here that you can only summise that the pay must have been pretty good.
For those of you who, like us, have your list of films you’ve seen this year in order of good to bad you now have a marker set for the bottom of the pile as Strangers: Prey at Night will do that job quite nicely – a boring, tiresome and quite frankly abysmal film that you’ll have forgotten about even before the credits roll.
Scott J.Davis | [rating=1]
Horror, Thriller | USA, 2018 |18|4th May 2018(UK) |Vertigo Releasing | Dir.Johannes Roberts | Christina Hendricks, Bailee Madison, Martin Henderson,Lewis Pullman
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