10 Recent Critical Duds We All Saw Coming
9. The Strangers: Chapter 1
In the same way that many will feel instantly pessimistic about any new MCU project, Renny Harlin being attached to any movie is also likely to set off alarm bells for most. He did some good work in the '90s - Deep Blue Sea, Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger - but Harlin's spent most of his career since then putting out bad movie after bad movie (The Legend of Hercules - enough said!). As such, The Strangers: Chapter 1, an unwanted horror reboot directed by him, seemed like a recipe for disaster.
2008's The Strangers is widely remembered for the brutally cold "Because you were home" line, but it isn't actually a particularly good horror film aside from that one scene. A reboot was never warranted, certainly not after 2016's The Strangers: Prey at Night was a failure, and the trailers for Chapter 1 looked like little more than a beat-by-beat retread of the original film which, once again, wasn't all that good to begin with.
Sometimes, trailers can do a wonderful job of tricking the audience, but in this particular case, no such luck. If one were to be generous, Chapter 1 is to some perhaps a very slight improvement over the original, yet it's still little more than a rote home invasion thriller that's mean-spirited more than anything else. Also, the attempt to replicate the iconic line from the original fell so flat it wasn't even funny.