Parents' Guide to The Strangers: Chapter 2

It could have opted to flesh its characters out to build suspense, but this excruciatingly lazy middle segment of a slasher trilogy does nothing to justify its existence. Renny Harlin's The Strangers: Chapter 2 is basically an ongoing series of sequences in which Maya is attacked, then escapes, then gets attacked, etc. It literally has no beginning and no end. The movie bluntly copies other horror movies, most notably the original Halloween II and even Cujo, but that's the least of its troubles. The characters behave in unreasonable ways, indicating that they've never seen any horror movies and know none of the genre's clichés. In one scene in the woods, Maya lights a fire, which shows that she has some good survival skills—but also that it never occurred to her that the smoke could draw attention.

But, of course, the strangers are also incompetent and can't seem to catch her anyway, despite their unexplained ability to magically teleport to wherever Maya is, including inside a locked room. Riddled with inconsistencies and lapses of logic, The Strangers: Chapter 2 seems to struggle to fill out its 96 minutes, as witnessed in the ill-advised "wild boar" sequence. It even, unwisely, provides flashbacks to the killers as little kids, ineffectively attempting to explain how they began their lives as slashers. But we've made it this far, and, like it or not, The Strangers: Chapter 3 is coming, for no good reason at all.