The title of last year’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 gave a pretty heavy hint that a sequel was planned and it has arrived quite rapidly. Renny Harlin is back in the director’s chair and Madelaine Petsch also returns as Maya Lucas, who survived the horrific events depicted in the last film. But, when The Strangers find out that Maya is still alive, she is the target all over again.
I have mixed feelings about this entry in the series. Overall it works better than Chapter 1. That is exemplified best in the first half hour. First when Maya has to escape the hospital, which reminded me of the underrated Halloween II, and then when she is picked up in a car, and she does not know if she can trust the occupants. In those sequences, Harlin captures, an uneasy, woozy feeling that gave me a knot in the stomach.
When Maya is left stranded in the woods things take a turn for the worst. She is attacked by a horrible CGI’d wild boar in a scene that felt like it was from a different, worse film. We also are, around that time, shown flashbacks to two of the Strangers’ childhood to illustrate how they ended up as killers. I thought that was not needed as it was scarier without that contextualisation.
However, there is another truly creepy scene to follow when Maya is trapped in a room with an intimidating guy who she is suspicious of, and the ending, despite a ‘to be continued’ caption, is good.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10