Jamie
What an interesting choice. I’ve become much more of a horror watcher as the years go on. I think part of it is that most of them are just about 90 minutes long. Really hits the sweet spot. So I do have a sense of the horror landscape. So if you were to tell me that a franchise (two films is still a franchise to Franchise Man) was looking to produce a trilogy to put their franchise-ness into hyperspeed and asked me who was the director of such a trilogy, I would immediately presume it was some up-and-comer. Some director who maybe had a low level hit on Shudder that had people wondering what their next project would be. If you said that I was wrong and that the director was in fact Renny Harlin of Cutthroat Island fame, I would say you were a lying liar who lies to me. As I said, what an interesting choice.
To recap, Maya and Ryan are two lovers just loving being lovers. But oh no! Maya is moving across the country and Ryan is a saddo! They stop in a small town to have lunch where some of the locals look at them creepy. But could it be more than that? Maybe, because suddenly their car is having engine trouble and a couple of the creepsters say it’s gonna be a while. The waitress recommends an Airbnb in the woods and soon they are loving being lovers in a lovely cabin in the woods. Ryan takes a motorcycle into town to get his inhaler and while away Maya is stalked by Dollface, Pin-up Girl and Masky or whatever. Ryan returns and says it was all a hallucination caused by smoking the reefer (tight) but soon they are both being attacked. Stranger! They evade and elude their tormentors and get a gun (he’s got a gun!) which they promptly use to kill the owner of the cabin by mistake. Oops! (Oh, and Stranger!) They try to take the dead guy’s truck but Masky smashes it up and Maya escapes into the woods and calls the police. Eventually they are both tracked down and brought back to the cabin where they are tortured. Ryan is killed and Maya is stabbed just for being there, but then the Strangers have to flee as the police are approaching. Ultimately, Maya survives. THE END (or is it? (You kidding?))
Ha! Now we’re talking. This movie sucks. I can’t believe they filmed a new trilogy concurrently. The second will definitely come out. That’s for sure. The third… I’m sensing the possibility of a straight-to-Shudder backroom deal. That’s if the trend continues. The trend of these movies totally sucking. It’s just a cheap version of the original with less interesting and more annoying main characters. They also jettisoned the drama aspect. Now The Strangers are like… part of a community that feeds people to The Strangers by luring them to a cabin? That’s terrible. At the very least when you have a franchise like this you have to double down on what people like. Like I see the structure as: a family or couple are having some drama, as a result they end up somewhere they usually wouldn’t be, The Strangers strike for no reason other than to kill! This breaks that. Kind of like that dumb Friday the 13th movie where some rando was the killer. Dumb.
Hot Take Clam Bake! What if… what if it isn’t just because Maya and Ryan were there. Yeah. What if Masky is Maya’s brother. He’s insane and mad because the family abandoned him in an asylum. Oh, and Dollface’s mask resembles Maya because she was a woman in the asylum with Masky and he forced her to play as her sister. Yeah, yeah! And she’s angry because she’s in love with Masky so she has to kill Maya to be with him. Yeah, hell yeah! And Pin-up Girl is Dollface’s sister who pretends to also hate Maya, but really is trying from the inside to save her sister from the Cult of Masky. She knows if she can kill Maya then maybe the spell will be broken. Lore! Lore, baby! Hot Take Temperature: Lore.
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! *Gif of me in a totally spooky mask and creeping around the woods and … wait, is this a prequel or a remake of my other gif?* Let’s go!
The Good? Hmmmmmmmm … nothing? It is weird to say it, but it feels like they took the first two movies, jammed them together, declared it as “not a remake”, and then were flabbergasted that people didn’t accept this.
The Bad? This movie is like the first but worse because the main characters are somehow even more unappealing. And the movie is like the second but worse because the setting seems like it should be cool, but pales in comparison to the trailer park from the second. The fact that they trot out “The Man in the Mask” / “Scarecrow” and the two ladies in all three films as if I care about those characters specifically is nuts. The film is almost certainly better if they started to mix that up a bit. Am I going crazy or is it undoubtedly better if there are a bunch of masks and it is made clear this is some strange multi-state conspiracy to get away with mass murders or something? Why are these same characters in Oregon now? They were in Ohio before, and prior to that I assume somewhere else. Why are they wandering around? Again, the biggest condemnation of the franchise is that while I ask these questions I genuinely do not give a shit about the answer.
The BMT? Hell naw. We’ll see how the rest of the trilogy works out (the films do make money, I would be surprised if they don’t get all three out eventually), but like what I expect with The Purge series these are made for a particular type of fan and tend to be focused on kills and rarely end up being fun in a real capacity.
Heyooooo. The saga of the image batch processing with Google AI Studio is complete. Well, there is at least something that seems to work and is worth checking out on a larger scale. Ultimately, by placing the stub (e.g. tt0085750 for Jaws 3-D) at the top it avoids issues with the model trying to figure out the indexing:
There were no issues of throwing errors or missing out or shifting stubs or anything. So really, this should set up for a good test on something like the top 100 posters from a year. I guess stay tuned.
I’m going to give Crap Boyfriend (Who?) to this goober in the film, he could not possibly be a bigger sourpuss the entire time. A Setting as a Character (Where?) for Oregon. I do like the MacGuffin (Why?) as to the inhaler specifically which goes from vital to worthless several times during the film for no good reason. And Worst Twist (How?) for the reveal that the main girl lived to the end, but is now going to be haunted by baghead or whatever. This film is Bad, it isn’t scary and in general, like the rest of the series, is dumb.
Read all about bags and junk I assume in the Quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 