The Strangers: Chapter 3

Renny Harlin’s mission to expand Bryan Bertino’s streamlined and extremely scary 2008 home-invasion slasher The Strangers into a full-on trilogy (shot simultaneously) makes Peter Jackson’s three-picture adaptation of The Hobbit look like an exercise in restraint. In Chapter 3, the deal is very much the same as it was in Chapter 2: Maya (Madelaine Petsch) plays the Final Girl role over an entire movie, while sporadic flashbacks provide backstories to killers who are more disturbing as featureless entities. You might say these strangers are getting over-familiar.

Credit where credit’s due, screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland do at least hit upon an intriguing scenario for how Scarecrow and his beloved Pin-Up Girl were joined in their door-knocking, serial-killing ways by Dollface, 12 years ago. They also come up with a surprising turn (well, if you’ve not seen the trailers) for Maya in her tortuous journey, a lefthand path that might have led to some interesting questions on the nature of evil were it not blighted by logic potholes and numerous coincidences. The plotting is crude, but less so than a couple of jump scares accompanied by blares so loud you can almost hear Harlin, in all seriousness, instructing the sound design be cranked up to 11.

Petsch gives it her best but her ordeal has been so prolonged it often feels repetitive, and it’s something of a relief when Maya’s sister, Debbie (Rachel Shenton), arrives with her husband, Howard (George Young), and bodyguard Marcus (Miles Yekinni) as fresh meat for Scarecrow’s axe. But even that disappoints, with the chapter being marketed as the trilogy’s most brutal bagging itself a 15-certificate.

“What did I do, why did you take me?” asks one victim. “Because you’re here,” comes the reply. Viewers might want to ask Harlin the same question, and there’s little on offer to suggest he has a more rounded answer.