Bryan Bertino’s nerve-rending thriller “The Strangers” (2008) — one of horror’s electrifying home invasion films — deserves better than the world-expanding but tingle-extinguishing treatment it’s had to endure in the director Renny Harlin’s reboot series that kicked off two years ago.
Now that the third and mercifully final film has flumped into theaters, this empty trilogy offers few worthwhile returns other than well-duh horror lessons that should (but won’t) sink in: Leave good horror alone, and relentless cat-and-mouse games do not a movie make.
Poor Madelaine Petsch looks over it as she returns to play Maya, the young woman who survived the home invasion that drove last year’s second, vapid chapter. Here, she again fights the signature villains of “The Strangers”: a trio of disguised killers who, in the original at least, were affectingly creepy anonymous monsters with mysterious motives. Harlin directs his cast as if their characters are disassociating from the violence around them — audiences will probably do the same — leaving the action, even the chases, to move slowly, as if everyone in town is waiting for Godot too.
As in his other “Strangers” films, Harlin leans heavily into loud jump scares and other obvious slasher stuff, choices that might thrill “Strangers” stans but will numb anyone who wants horror to offer solicitude and fresh ideas. Flashbacks meant to explore the killers’ motivations have no bite.
As sketched, thinly, by the returning writers Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland, Maya is a shapeless, cookie-cutter final girl — apropos for this hapless finale, girl.
The Strangers: Chapter 3 Rated R for knives plunging into guts and other bloody acts. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters.
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