The entire opening half hour is devoted to the drama of Kinsey facing off against her parents ( Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) and older brother (Lewis Pullman) during the weekend they pile into the car to haul Kinsey off to boarding school. There’s no real terror or dread in it, just the same old meat-puppet gore and cattle-prod scares served up with a kind of ritualized self-satisfaction.įor a movie this formulaic, “Prey at Night” has an awfully slow build-up. This movie, though, is so programmed it could be a video game. Technically, it has nothing at all to do with that series, but its masked killers now play like “Purge” offshoots - vengeful devil dolls in a world gone to hell.

“Prey at Night” is a post-“Purge” sequel. That, however, was five years before “The Purge” (2013) figured out how to turn slasher anarchy into a kind of rebel posture. Why go to a hideously obvious slasher movie, with no tricks up its sleeve beyond its use of songs like Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America,” and Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All” to accompany images of operatic slaughter? (At times, the films feels like it could be “Friday the 13th” scored to Andy Cohen’s iPod.) Why sit through a series of blade-twisting slaughters as routine as they are grisly? Why not? And the audience for “ The Strangers: Prey at Night” may identify with the sentiment. The assailant, who appears to be not much older than Kinsey, looks right back at her and summons her best sickie-harpy grin as she says, “Why not?”Īs motivations for homicidal maniacs go, this one carries a bit of Brando (“Whaddya got?”) spiced with a pinch of Manson. “Why are you doing this?” cries Kinsey (Bailee Madison), a teen-delinquent Wednesday Addams in an off-the-shoulder Ramones T-shirt, as she stares into the face of the killer she has just unmasked.

Movie strangers prey at night