Studio:   Lionsgate
Director: Renny Harlin
Writer:   Alan R. Cohen, Alan Freedland
Producer: Courtney Solomon, Mark Canton, Christopher Milburn, Gary Raskin, Alastair Burlingham, Charlie Dombek
Stars:    Madelaine Petsch, Gabriel Basso, Froy Gutierrez, Ema Horvath, Ella Bruccoleri, Richard Brake, Brooke Johnson, Rafaella Biscayn, Rachel Shenton

Review Score:

Summary:

Three masked murderers continue to terrorize a young woman as she becomes further entrenched in a small-town conspiracy.

Synopsis:

Using her position as a waitress, Shelly, who is secretly the masked murderer Pinup Girl, targets a Carol’s Diner patron to be killed. Shelly/Pinup and her cohorts Scarecrow and Dollface subsequently terrorize the man and murder him in the woods.

Having survived her previous encounter with Scarecrow, Pinup, and Dollface, Maya recovers in a hospital where she is treated by a nurse named Danica. Doctor Tate informs Maya that her fiancé Ryan died from blood loss.

Sheriff Rotter and Deputy Tommy Walters take Maya’s statement about the masked intruders who attacked her and Ryan. The sheriff and his deputy react oddly when Maya mentions that the ordeal started when someone came to the door of their Airbnb asking for a girl named Tamara.

Sheriff Rotter and Deputy Walters stop at Carol’s Diner after leaving the hospital. Shelly overhears the men telling Carol that Maya survived her attack. Local mechanic Rudy, Rudy’s assistant Dougie, and a woman named Jasmine also hear the news.

Maya asks Nurse Danica who Tamara is, but Danica only indicates Tamara is a name heard in a local ghost story. Maya’s friend Debbie calls to say she is on her way from London to get Maya out of the hospital.

Maya receives a phone call asking if Tamara is there. Frightened, Maya exits her room to find the hospital bizarrely empty. Scarecrow and Pinup start stalking Maya throughout the building. When an orderly inadvertently encounters Scarecrow, Scarecrow murders him with an ax.

Maya escapes outside and makes her way on foot to a nearby ranch. Shar, a farmer, confronts Maya at gunpoint. When Maya mentions contacting the sheriff, Shar begins to reveal something about Sheriff Rotter when she is suddenly killed from behind by Pinup firing a crossbow. Maya attacks Pinup with a pitchfork and flees.

Maya runs into a road where Danica and her ex-military friend Chris are passing in a vehicle. Maya gets in, but she throws a fit upon suspecting the two women might be involved with the masked murderers. Danica implores Maya to calm down as she explains she will take Maya back to her place for safety.

Danica stops her car for two men in the road who turn out to be her supposedly stranded roommates Gregory and Wayne. Noticing a smiley face tattoo below Gregory’s ear, Maya becomes additionally suspicious of the situation, so she grabs a knife and jumps out of the moving vehicle to flee into the forest.

With dawn breaking, Scarecrow, Pinup, and Dollface search the woods for Maya. After stitching her exacerbated stomach wound and surviving a wild boar attack, Maya returns to the Airbnb she rented with Ryan, which is now a crime scene.

At the rental cabin, Maya meets Billy Bufford, who identifies himself as an Oregon State Police Internal Affairs investigator looking into Sheriff Rotter’s lack of response to unsolved murders in the area. Maya gets into Billy’s vehicle, but Billy is suddenly killed by Pinup’s crossbow. Maya immediately drives away with Pinup and Dollface in pursuit.

When Billy’s vehicle breaks down, Maya seeks help at a nearby house that turns out to belong to Danica and her roommates. Still wary of Danica, Chris, Gregory, and Wayne, Maya stares at Gregory’s smiley face tattoo, prompting him to reveal he got it on a church trip when he was younger. Before leaving the house alone, Gregory tells Maya the local murders have gone on for years, and Maya is the only person who survived.

Having been dispatched by a concerned call from Maya’s friend Debbie, an EMT driver stops at Rudy’s auto garage for gas. Rudy reacts strangely when the driver mentions he is picking up someone at a nearby lake house.

Pinup and Dollface attack Maya in the bedroom where Danica put her to rest. Maya escapes to the main room where she finds Danica and Chris restrained to chairs with their throats cut. Outside on the porch, Maya also finds Wayne seemingly dead from a plastic bag taped around his head.

With the EMT driver nowhere in sight, Maya escapes to his empty ambulance only to be attacked by Pinup. Maya stabs Pinup in her head with scissors and Pinup collapses. Believing Pinup to be dead, Maya drives away as Scarecrow breaks the ambulance’s windows. Still alive, Pinup strangles Maya from behind, causing the vehicle to overturn.

Maya flees from the wreckage as Scarecrow and Dollface arrive in their truck to collect Pinup’s body. Scarecrow unmasks Pinup as Shelly. From nearby trees, Maya observes Scarecrow mourning Shelly’s apparent death.

Cradling her and her mask, Scarecrow reflects back to 20 years earlier, when Shelly had a crush on him during their childhood together at a private school. Previously seen killing a mouse, Shelly’s jealousy drives her to use a rock to bludgeon their classmate Tamara to death after she sees Tamara kissing Scarecrow during a game that involved knocking on a playhouse door. Unexpectedly, the incident bonds Scarecrow and Shelly, who subsequently hold hands and draw a smiley face in Tamara’s blood as unidentified adults are seen rushing toward them.

Review:

One thing that can be said in defense of the writers behind “The Strangers: Chapter 2” is that it’s not an easy creative endeavor to develop three full movies from the simple setup of masked intruders terrorizing two people, especially when that plot was already perfected in the 2008 film (review here) this trilogy is based on. That completes the list of things that can be said in defense of the writers behind “The Strangers: Chapter 2,” a comically ill-conceived sequel that asks all the wrong questions about how to expand a conceptually limited idea.

“What if we move the horror of a home invasion out of a house and into a vast forest landscape? What if flashbacks give the mysterious villains backstories that identify them and explain their murderous origins? What if we also include elements that introduce a cult or some other vague conspiracy, but hold off on meaningful hints about what’s really going on because the thin fiction has to be spread across three movies? In other words, what if we take ‘The Strangers’ and do the exact opposite of everything that made ‘The Strangers’ suspenseful and successful in the first place?”

“The Strangers: Chapter 2” oddly opens on text that says, “In 2023 (a curious year to single out since this movie is from 2025 and its predecessor is from 2024), over 1670 people in the United States were murdered by strangers. They were chosen at random (with emphasis on the word ‘random’).”

“Random” doesn’t really apply anymore though, because Maya survived her “The Strangers: Chapter 1” (review here) encounter with Scarecrow, Pinup Girl, and Dollface, making her a deliberate target of the trio as she undergoes recovery in a hospital. I’m not sure why they’d risk going after someone specific. Maya didn’t see anyone’s face. All she knows about the murderers is they kick off their killings by knocking on a door to ask for someone named “Tamara.” Particularly after Maya gives her statement to Sheriff Rotter and Deputy Walters, who may or may not be involved in whatever skullduggery is going on in the town of Venus, Oregon, what do Scarecrow, Pinup Girl, and Dollface have to gain by going after “the one who got away?”

Sensible motivations are hard for “The Strangers: Chapter 2” to come up with. After escaping Scarecrow, Pinup Girl, and Dollface’s attacks in the hospital and at a nearby farm, Maya runs into a rainy road where she flags down a passing car that happens to be driven by Danica, a nurse who treated Maya at the hospital, with Danica’s friend Chris as a passenger.

Like it does with the sheriff and deputy, the movie wants both Maya and the audience to be wary of whether or not Danica and her friend are accomplices of the strangers, maybe even under the masks, or sincere Samaritans who could possibly help Maya. But the behavior they exhibit to be presented as potentially suspicious is beyond bizarre to ever be perceived as normal.

Once Danica locks her car’s doors, Maya flies into a fit of panicked fear. Instead of clarifying that they’re not involved with the people pursuing her, Danica and Chris merely tell her to “calm down.” Then on their drive back to Danica’s house, Danica gets out to talk to two men in the road. We don’t hear what they say as they each turn to look at Maya through the windshield, but they’re soon introduced as Danica’s roommates Gregory and Wayne, who get in the car on either side of Maya in the backseat. Maya can’t stop staring at a smiley face tattoo below Gregory’s ear. Neither man can stop staring strangely at Maya. Then Chris pulls out a serrated hunting knife to cut herself a slice of apple, something she absolutely must do in this moment, in this manner, with a traumatized woman suffering from visible stab wounds sitting terrified right behind her.

In the hospital earlier, Maya asks Danica about the name Tamara, which Maya sloughs off as having something to do with a local ghost story she doesn’t bother to explain. Not long after, the camera cuts to a shot of Danica smoking a cigarette in a payphone, suggesting she couldn’t wait to talk to an unknown person about Maya’s question. Except the payphone is well out of Maya’s eyeline, since she’s still confined to her room at this point, making this purely a non-narrative cheat for the audience only.

Maya jumps out of Danica’s vehicle and flees into the trees. Here, “The Strangers: Chapter 2” turns into a common woodland survival thriller. Having exacerbated a stomach wound, Maya stops by a creek to stitch herself. Putting a needle and thread through flesh is already an overdone insert in horror included solely for a cheap squirm. This one is made additionally annoying by the fact that it takes Maya almost four minutes to do it. Then again, that’s getting off easy compared to the seven minutes spent with Maya fending off a wild boar.

“The Strangers: Chapter 2” makes its overuse of tropes more obnoxious by employing many of them more than once. Two times a new character enters a scene as Maya’s apparent savior only to almost immediately be killed, by the same person and in the same way. Counting one that overturns and another whose engine suddenly overheats, Maya’s getaway vehicles strand her twice. And whether she’s in the hospital, at Danica’s house, or anywhere else, Maya’s cellphone never has service whenever she needs it most.

The film slips in additional nonsense in the form of confusing cutaways to two B storylines. The first involves flashbacks to Scarecrow and Pinup Girl as children, highlighting how they were brought together through their classmate Tamara, in case you needed to know where that notorious name came from too. The other arc follows Sheriff Rotter and Deputy Walters. Twice they visit a diner. Another time they circle a parking lot, possibly searching for Scarecrow’s truck, although exactly what they’re doing there is never revealed. The only reason these secondary stories are broken up into brief bits here and there seems to be to advance time in Maya’s main arc.

With one more sequel still to come, I can almost feel sorry for Lionsgate being stuck under a building that’s already collapsed. Yet that’s the risk companies run by prebuilding franchises before waiting to find out if the first film flops. Now that the second one has further doomed “The Strangers” trilogy as an overambitious exercise in futile fiction, it’s difficult to imagine any viewer still being remotely interested in what happens to Maya, finding out who might be secretly working with the killers, or why anyone ever thought this would be the best way to spark a new series.

Review Score: 25