Stranger Still

So there I am, feeling very smug about my smackdown of The Strangers that I wrote yesterday and satisfied by the fact that my meager readership had once again been saved by me from having to view an example of cinematic stupidity when I finally got around to reading Roger Ebert's review. He didn't like it either, a fact that was hardly surprising but he then had to go ahead and make me feel sorry for director Bryan Bertino. There are movie fans who obsess over behind-the-scenes details of movie making. They can tell you the life story of the guy who worked as key grip on Iron Man or that the actor who played "Guy Holding Hotdog" in Forgetting Sarah Marshall was a real trooper because he had an infected hangnail yet never let go of the hotdog even during multiple takes. I, however, am not one of those people. When it comes to movies, I care about what's on the screen and how it got there is generally immaterial, at least to me. If I know any sort of background, it's usually because it was some heavily publicized story. Bryan Bertino's story was not heavily publicized.

I knew this was his first movie both as writer and director because I looked that up as soon as I got home. That explained a lot of the film's story gaps and poorly made creative choices. Bertino's full story is a Hollywood dream come true. He was working as a laborer on some nameless low budget thing when he pitched his idea to his bosses and they not only picked it up but actually wanted him to direct it. I read once how Jack Palance got his role on Shane by lying when he said he knew how to ride a horse. Bertino takes that story and beats the crap out of it by agreeing to direct the movie then literally buying books on how to direct a film. If I take those facts and judge the movie by that standard, it's damn near a masterpiece. In fact, the job of direction was not what was wrong with the movie. Bertino did not make the mistakes that many first time directors make of taking every trick they learned in film school and combining them into an incomparable mish-mash that looks like it was made by a schizophrenic. These would include using every imaginable angle, having the camera spin, excessive use of slow motion* and telling half the movie in flashbacks**. Bertino may have actually been aided by the fact that he had not taken classes on these things. In an online interview, Bryan Bertino talks about his love of 70s genre films and I believe it shows up here. Instead of looking as if he'd swallowed everything he learned in film school and vomiting it all onto the screen, The Strangers more closely resembled the look and feel of movies like The Exorcist, Don't Look Now and even Halloween.

So Bertino has potential as a director. The flaws of the movie came from the writing which gave us villains who can seemingly move at super speed, walk through walls and see in the dark and heroes who often behave like idiots. Mr. Bertino, on the off chance that you are someone who obsessively Googles his own name and is actually reading this, you may not want to use old horror movie cliches like having your male lead say, "I'm going out to the shed to use the old radio," when everyone watching the movie knew that he shouldn't do that? And why shouldn't he do that? As I mentioned in my original review, at that point of the story he and his girlfriend had found the best position in the house and were defending it with A DAMN SHOTGUN!

Ebert also talks about something I had meant to address but simply forgot to do so. The movie opens with the words, "Inspired By True Events." If you ever see those words in a movie, you can rest assured that you are watching a work of complete fiction. Chronicles Of Narnia can probably make a better claim to being inspired by reality than any movie that actually claims to do so. Texas Chainsaw Massacre makes similar claims and it turned out that the "True Events" had nothing to do with an inbred Texas family headlined by a deformed chainsaw wielding psycho but rather by Wisconsin serial killer Ed Gein. In this case, "True Events" behind The Strangers were the murders committed by the Manson Family.

So, to sum up, despite newly found mitigating circumstances, The Strangers is a work of fiction that still sucks though perhaps we'll all pay attention to Bryan Bertino's next movie which will doubtlessly be about a psychopath who hacks apart a convent full of nuns that was inspired by a guy who accidentally stepped on a nun's foot.

*The Strangers opens with a slow motion sequence that made me wince as I figured it would be done again and again but that ended quickly and slow motion was not used again. so thanks for that at least, Bryan Bertino. That alone raises you above the level of Talentless Fuckwit.

**Again, there are a few flashbacks and I was worried we'd be seeing considerably more but they stop when the terror starts. This was another good decision and feeds into my classification of Bertino as "Not a Fuckwit."