You might anticipate a certain expansiveness of theme and plot arc to any preplanned narrative trilogy. But that expectation would be wasted on Renny Harlin’s three-part continuation of Lionsgate’s “The Strangers” franchise, which was shot continuously in one “LOTR”-type go on Slovenian locations (standing in for Oregon) two years ago. Now that viewers have reached the two-thirds point, it’s pretty clear what the director and his writers have contrived might just as easily have fit into a single feature — a format that worked perfectly well for Bryan Bertino’s eerily minimalist 2008 original, as well as Johannes Roberts’ more conventional but vivid follow-up “Prey at Night” a decade later.
The arrival of Harlin’s “Chapter 1” last May raised just moderate excitement: Between a clichéd opening stretch and underwhelming climax, it was a decent-enough exercise in basic stalk-and-slash suspense. “The Strangers: Chapter 2” earned far worse reviews out of Fantastic Fest, citing the flimsy writing and some ill-conceived backstory. But taken purely as a boilerplate thrill-ride, the sequel really isn’t half bad. A reliable craftsman who’s rarely dull, Harlin gets solid mileage from mostly dialogue-free setpieces in which Madelaine Petsch’s already-wounded heroine is endlessly pursued and threatened by the series’ masked killers. We may be in guilty pleasure territory here, but hey, I’m now more up for “3” now than would’ve been anticipated after “Chapter 1.”
That prior installment ended with Maya (Petsch) left for dead, then waking in a rural hospital after a night of home-invasion terror at a rental cabin her boyfriend Ryan (Froy Gutierrez, seen in flashbacks here) did not survive. A tag sequence amid the closing credits suggested her ordeal was hardly over. Indeed, she’s barely regained consciousness when the locals of Venus are again setting off her alarm bells, followed soon by a scary phone call and the sound of scuffling outside her room. The hospital staff are nowhere to be found, the exits locked and the power out. Needless to say, within moments, she’s running down corridors for her life, again fleeing three silent figures in Halloween-type masks, bearing deadly weapons.
After a couple very close shaves, she stumbles out of the building into a driving rainstorm, assailants still on her tail. She occasionally meets a stranger who might be helpful — indeed, it appears some among the vaguely malevolent townies are not immune to being attacked by those same ghouls. But no one can be trusted, including the sheriff (Richard Brake) or various younger locals played by Emma Horvath, Brooke Johnson, Gabriel Basso, Milo Callaghan and others. Unsurprisingly, any fellow city slickers trying to come to Maya’s rescue (a sister alerted to her peril is pulling strings long-distance) immediately find themselves at the top of the lethal hit list.
It’s a good thing “Chapter 2” doesn’t linger long in the hospital, as that would be over-redolent of the original “Halloween II,” Norwegian “Cold Prey 2” and other slashers stranded in that locale. But Harlin can eke a fair degree of atmospheric dread and spring a handy jolt or two in just about any setting, the best such instances here taking advantage of a morgue and a horse stable.
Most viewers could probably do without the scene in which Maya (having handily acquired a medical kit bag) painfully sutures her re-opened stomach wound. The movie arguably jumps the shark once she’s confronted in the woods with a different non-human carnivorous beast whose computer-generated depiction is none too convincing. There are also moments when the need to make every margin character act suspiciously acquires the illogical silliness of 1970s Italian giallo thrillers.
The worst thing in Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland’s screenplay, however, are flashbacks to a grade-school triangle between characters who presumably grow up to be our masked serial murderers. This attempt at laying psychological foundation for present-day mayhem (though there’s no evident connection to the entire franchise’s first two films) is primitive at best. More intriguing is the running hint that the high body count hereabouts may be connected to some kind of religious fanaticism, an idea we’ll have to wait until part 3 to see further developed. As before, there’s a tease of things to come in the final credits, this time suggesting the trilogy might really end up going somewhere in terms of revealing a larger, explanatory conspiracy.
Though she and Gutierrez made for rather bland leads previously, their characters granted little definition in the script, Petsch rises to the occasion of an almost entirely physical performance here — Maya is put through the mill, which she endures with increasing grit. Other turns are competent, though not given a lot to work with, Basso in particular getting one late scene that is showy for no obvious reason at all, and thus plays like actor indulgence.
What does work throughout, even when the pileup of our heroine’s brushes with death starts to teeter, is Harlin’s engineering of tense action. The conceptual originality is lacking to make “Chapter 2”’s chase and confrontation episodes memorable. Still, they nonetheless channel solid doses of ominous chill and vivid peril — without much graphic gore, even. Liberated from the first installment’s confinement largely to one interior, cinematographer Jose David Montero makes the most of his frequently forested locations. Editor Michelle Harrison keeps things generally taut despite some repetitious content, and an original score by Justin Burnett and Oscar Senen presses the musical panic button with considerable skill.
