The Strangers - Harry Potter 6 Books

Product Description

Inspired by true events, this heart pounding, nail-biting frightener mercilessly explores our most universal fears, where simply opening the door to a stranger leads to a grueling night of terror one could never imagine. Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman star in this relentless suspense thriller that will keep you up at night and make you never want to answer the door again!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1985 in DVD
• Brand: Universal
• Released on: 2008-10-21
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Dubbed in: French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 85 minutes

Amazon.com
A lean, briskly paced and exceptionally creepy thriller, The Strangers earns its scares the old-fashioned way: through atmosphere, sound design, and a simple yet undeniably upsetting central premise that allows for maximum tension throughout its running time. Attractive young lovers Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are already having a bad day--she's turned down his marriage proposal--before a knock on the door in the middle of the night announces a full-fledged siege on their remote vacation home by a trio of masked assailants. The film's first third delivers the most consistent shivers as the visitors make their presence and intentions known to Tyler; the second half grows more frantic and bloody before a gruesome finale that may leave viewers either rattled to their core or bothered by its empty nihilism. Speedman is fine as the downtrodden male lead (who's seen tucking into a carton of ice cream after being rejected), but it's Tyler who impresses the most by shouldering the lion's share of the terror. First-time writer/director Bryan Bertino impresses by forsaking the current passion for over-the-top violence (save for the finale) in favor of more traditional means of generating fear, and if his project borrows heavily from other films, most notably the French chiller Them (which shares its "inspired by a true story" origin) and Michael Haneke's Funny Games, at least he's taking from the best. The sound design is among the many technical standouts, and the unsettling score by tomandandy (The Hills Have Eyes) pleasantly evokes Ennio Morricone's fuzztone-heavy work for Dario Argento in the early '70s. On a completely unrelated note, LP fanatics should appreciate how both the film's heroes and villains share an affinity for folk and country music on vinyl. --Paul Gaita

Customer Reviews

TERROR - Without too much gore
Terrifying movie with some real surprises. Relies more on suspense than on gore (although this is not a movie for the squeamish). Certainly not perfect, but still a good rental if you don't over-analyze.

Not as Scary as I thought
My husband and I saw the trailer for this movie and were hooked. We ordered it right away. We are horror film fanatics so we are not as easily scared as most. However, after the first 30 minutes we were like o.k. this really isnt that scary. It was more of a..oh gosh please dont go and do that type of movie. I think that the mask that they wore actually was the only thing that made this movie a little scary..any thiller junkie has seen this story play out thousands of times. So an o.k. thiller no Texas Chainsaw Masacre by any means.

Don't Answer the Door at 4 A.M.
This is a good little chiller--despite giant holes in the plot and a heroine who is so helpless and fragile that she should be in a nursing home. The story is a classic setting for fear and mayhem: an isolated house out in the woods where a couple is terrorized by mysterious forces.

The first time you hear the sudden knocking on the door, you experience a sense of dread. Not many people have a visitor knocking on their door at 3 or 4 in the morning. When the visitor turns out to be a total stranger, asking a strange question, the suspense mounts. But what does Scott Speedman, the husband, do? He moseys out to his car for a drive, or is it to buy some cigarettes. Anyway, his gentle, child-like bride, liv Tyler is left alone and another visitor knocks on the door. Throughout this movie, the actress portrays a woman who is so pathetically a "Daddy's Girl," that she can't function on her own. She cringes and cowers and when she gets her husband on the phone, she doesn't sound very scared. She just tells him to hurry home. Does she check the windows and doors to see if they're locked? Does she gather around her an arsenal of possible weapons to use--like knives, screw drivers, heavy plates, pots, etc. She does none of these things.

She just sits and nervously waits for her man to come back to protect her. When the violence escalates, she retreats even more into child-like behavior, not even bothering to help out her poor husband who is being beaten up and tortured. She just screams and wails and hides out. One scene is unbelievably illogical: her husband has made his way to the garage while the killers are all around. And what does his wife do? She just sits on the backsteps of the house, her head resting on her knees, exposed to the killers. When she does FINALLY grab a knife for defense, it's the smallest one in her kitchen. I would have found the biggest one to protect myself. And when a buddy of her husband finally comes to visit them, the couple have barricaded themselves in a room. The buddy doesn't even say anything, like, "Hey, anybody around?" He just walks into the darkened house with destroyed furniture everywhere and something really bad happens to him. The wife has another chance to shriek and gibber and wail, alerting the killers to their hideout.

Despite these weaknesses, this movie proves that you can still make an effective thriller on a low budget without l00 million dollars worth of special effects or paying some actor $25 million to show his face for the camera. If they could have made the wife figure a feisty, realistic woman of 2008, this flick could have been even better. Maybe in the sequel that's being planned, we'll have a female who knows when it's time to fight back and stop looking for her "man" to protect her.