The Strangers: Critic Reviews

It sounds stupid enough, and ultimately is, but the director, Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache.

This is no splatter movie: spare, suspenseful and brilliantly invested in silence, Bryan Bertinoa(TM)s debut feature unfolds in a slow crescendo of intimidation.

Messy, intermittently effective ordeal horror.

The Strangers has a couple of scares, but it's not anywhere near as frightening as advertised. The creepy folks of the title are more fumbling than fiendish.

I like watching snakes eat mice just as much as the next fella, maybe even more, but The Strangers turns the gobble-'em-up into an ordeal. It's a fraud from start to finish.

[Director] Bertino has the pretensions of an artist and the indelicacy of a hack. He tries to get under our skin with a pile driver.

An old-school spooker spun from the blood splatter on a wall, a nearby record player scratching an oldie, a CB radio in the garage, a creaky swing set in the backyard.

Every silence, pause and sudden noise startles -- and the results, frankly, are more frightening than the graphic torture scenes in movies like Hostel and Saw.

At least it's short.

The movie deserves more stars for its bottom-line craft, but all the craft in the world can't redeem its story.

Anchored by convincing performances from Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler, both of whom elevate their roles above the standard horror-movie caricature, this is an enormously unsettling movie.

There's nothing remotely new here, but the movie has the taut, queasy feel of an early 70s drive-in shocker: old-fashioned suspense without any guarantee of old-fashioned mercy.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

It's an efficiently made, appropriately terrifying film, downright minimalist in approach and all the more horrifying for it. It's so basic it's believable.

If you're a fan of the genre, The Strangers provides all the shocks and scares you could possibly want.

It's all efficiently nerve-jangling, with Tyler and Speedman credibly registering every hue of panic.

Kind of like what The Shining might be if you took out the ESP. And the ghosts. And the chilling atmosphere. So call it The Sucking.

Fans of the 'pitiless/merciless killers' school of horror should get a jolt out of The Strangers, a harrowing real-time tale of an assault on a remote country home.

With no plot to speak of, no character development whatsoever, no theme and precious little intrigue, what we have here is simply a pileup of effects. And not especially special effects.

Chilling feature.

It's intense but not necessarily fun and may disappoint less sophisticated horror fans. However, for die-hard supporters of unsettling peeks into the dark side of human nature, this is a welcome excursion.

A frightfully effective chiller.

There?s no better feet-on-the-seat execution for the home-invasion genre than this. "The Strangers" twists the knife with scenes lasting a beat longer than normal to maximize dread and sound design excavating a hole in your cortex and nestling there.

Grinding and suffocating

Bryan Bertino's psycho-thriller gets the job done for nearly two-thirds of its length. But when it shows its hand, it folds.