The Strangers

It's precisely the film's spare, disciplined, back-to-basics horror effects that lend it a sustaining chill.

First-time writer and director Bryan Bertino makes a splashy debut here. He swiftly creates a dark, unsettling mood that never lightens.

The Strangers is certainly nothing new to the genre, but it certainly feels new in its delivery of legitimate, heart-pounding scares.

Bertino's taut, spare thriller is plenty scary without relying on pseudo-historical context.

It's the stuff of nightmares, for people who like to be truly creeped out. The Strangers is just the opposite of a date movie: Take someone you want to break up with.

Bryan Bertino's The Strangers is a white-knuckle thriller in which a couple going through relationship difficulties is terrorized by psychos.

Unlike all the CGI-laden blockbusters or outrageous comedies we've been bombarded with lately, The Strangers actually delivers the most effective thrills of the summer.

Once he gets past an unnecessary, based-on-a-true-story opening (yeah, right), Bertino is almost always a step ahead of us.

There's nothing more to it than meets the eye, but Bertino understands the mechanics of suspense and knows how to use them.

Sure, Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman are both easy on the eyes, but in this flick, it's what you don't see that will freak you out. A knock at the door has never been this terrifying.

The Strangers is nothing fancy, though for a first-timer, Bertino paints a nice claustrophobic picture and knows what to do with the dark.

It's an efficiently made, appropriately terrifying film, downright minimalist in approach and all the more horrifying for it. It's so basic it's believable.

It sounds stupid enough, and ultimately is, but the director, Bryan Bertino, stages The Strangers' early scenes with spooky panache.

The Strangers features scant dialogue, linear one-act plotting and not so much as a whiff of post-modernism. It's simply there to scare you. The tension is non-stop.

For the first 20 minutes or so, The Strangers motors along nicely, full of promise. It’s only when it takes the exit into Hackneyed Horrorville that things turn slightly disappointing.

The Strangers is a potent thriller that successfully covers a suspenseful cat-and-mouse game all the way to its bloody finale.

No amount of torture porn practitioners, Asian ghost girls or updated teen slashers can evoke the type of terror suggested by the trio of masked home invaders in the new thriller The Strangers.

There’s little that distinguishes this movie’s basic plot from scores of other fright films over the decades, but The Strangers is more effective than most because of Bertino’s deft manipulation of the storyteller’s tools.

Too bad then that onto this creepy canvas are placed such dull performances. The Strangers is all about the victim’s perspective but Liv is no Scream Queen.

The Strangers is a must-see for horror fans, but the fewer questions you ask, the more effective it will be.

The Strangers will, like most decent horror movies, give you a renewed appreciation for your own safety.

Every silence, pause and sudden noise startles -- and the results, frankly, are more frightening than the graphic torture scenes in movies like Hostel and Saw.

Fans of the "pitiless/merciless killers" school of horror should get a jolt out of The Strangers, a harrowing real-time tale of an assault on a remote country home.

For his debut feature film, writer-director Bryan Bertino set out to do nothing more than scare the pants off an audience.

It gets repetitive and a little silly, no matter how hard Liv Tyler works at being terrorized.

The Strangers is unsettling as much for the stupidity of its characters and its poor execution as for its genuine shivers or spookiness.

A tightly wrapped package of B-plus actors, first-rate sound effects and camerawork that's jumpy in all the right places. You're best off appreciating the wrapping, however, because the package is empty.

It gets less scary and less tense as it goes along. And it's extremely disappointing to see that it also gets considerably more graphic and violent as its progresses.

Bertino is more than a little skilled at rattling your nerves and making you jump out of your seat: I twitched and spasmed more times during The Strangers than I did since I sneaked in to see Friday the 13th while in the eighth grade.

For a film too goofy to be scary and too clumsy to be fun, even the least discerning splatter fan will find it hard to depend on the violence of The Strangers.

The Strangers can't escape the been-there, done-that feeling of déjà vu that permeates its chilling tale of domestic terror and random, senseless violence.

The combination of weak acting, a fuzzy script, standard horror gimmicks and a surprise ending that is not that surprising makes The Strangers an unwelcome guest at the local theaters.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

The camera especially loves Tyler, though she really doesn't do much but run around screaming her pretty head off.

Bryan Bertino is a kid, this is his first movie, and as much as I hate it, it's a competent movie that shows he has the chops to be a director.

A pointless and -- even worse -- pretentious horror thriller apparently aimed at Crate & Barrel shoppers rather than the teen demographic that turned Saw and Hostel into hits.

Early scenes build tenderness for Tyler and Speedman's characters, only to squander our compassion with sorry plotting.

Ripped off from about 30 other alone-in-the-dark horror flicks, The Strangers has few scares, weak acting and a by-the-numbers script.

Bertino does create a few scares. But the main characters show so much stupidity and so little likability, in no time you'll root for them to die and The Strangers to prevail.

Unfolding with an almost startling lack of self-awareness, young filmmaker Bryan Bertino's debut is such a careful, straight-faced knockoff of '70s exploitation films it plays like a parody.

Writer-director Bryan Bertino makes his debut with the film, which drags itself forward like a gut-shot deer.

Within minutes it's clear Bertino has used up his best ammo, but he keeps shooting the same blanks until he reaches (barely) a feature-length run time.

No one is getting at anything in The Strangers, except the cheapest, ugliest kind of sadistic titillation.

This is straight-up nightmare fuel, unredeemed by compelling characters or interesting motives.

Let's give writer-director Bryan Bertino credit. He knows how to frame a shot to make characters seem vulnerable.

With no plot to speak of, no character development whatsoever, no theme and precious little intrigue, what we have here is simply a pileup of effects.

The truth is that you shouldn’t pay a dime to endure The Strangers, as tasteless an exercise in fear and futility as we’ll see this year.

The Strangers doesn't weigh itself down with too much backstory or explanation.

The Strangers is kinda like what The Shining might be if you took out the ESP. And the chilling atmosphere. And the interesting actors. And the ghosts. What are we left with? How about The Sucking?

Aside from a sick-joke murder midway through, the film concentrates on arbitrary jolts.