Call it The Trailer Park that Dreaded Sundown or The Trailer Parks Have Eyes, but this movie is a total throwback to horror flicks 40-50 years ago. Listen to the John Carpenter-esque synth music, watch Bag-Headed Killer trying to cut up a girl in the back of a pickup, or just soak in the foggy atmosphere of a trailer park at night, and you're transported to iconic genre films of decades gone by. While Prey at Night is nominally the sequel to Bryan Bertino's now-classic The Strangers (2008 -- a decade already!?) and creates an interesting two-part dimension to its own potential franchise, it seems first and foremost to be a stylish homage to another age of horror.
Johannes Roberts, who recently directed the creepy and silly 47 Meters Down, is again working with a skim budget here but manages to do some really interesting things with what he's been given. Bertino, serving now as a writer, throws us into another family's sordid life as they visit family members who run a trailer park. They're on their way to dropping off Kinsey (Bailee Madison of Once Upon a Time) at boarding school and are totally unaware that the off-season abandoned park is also a killing ground. That's right, the trio of masked killers are back, torturing and slaughtering people for no real reason. It doesn't take long before the bodies pile up.
Roberts films everything with long takes, most of which pan slowly around the nighttime park as characters run around. These long shots and long takes are interspersed with super close-ups (also often long takes) on the actors as they respond to pain or terror; these shots serve to make us claustrophobic and to force us to peer at the unfocused background, anxiously awaiting the killers' figures to emerge from the shadows. It's a difficult balance, and I think Roberts' editor and cinematographer make a good team in that regard. There aren't many jump-scares, but there are some nasty shockers, most of which involve the sort of torturous, gory violence that the first film embraced in its climax.
But the film doesn't quite measure up to its predecessor in freshness or integrity. This one is self-conscious and deliberately tries to up its own ante when it really should know better. The trappings of a bigger, badder sequel are all there. More family members to die. No introduction to the killers is necessary. Instead of being locked in a house, we have the full range of a trailer park. And yet nothing really new or interesting happens. The killers always pop up in places that don't really make sense, if they should be stalking their prey; why is Doll-Face hiding under a blanket in a random bedroom of a random trailer playing with a Jack-in-the-Box? Creepy? Sure, but it does strike the viewer as gimmicky and illogical.
The leads are nothing terribly special either. I just didn't care about any of them the way I cared for Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman in the first. Christina Hendricks is always fun to watch, but (SPOILER ALERT) she dies first. Her hunky husband (Martin Henderson) and pretty son Luke (Lewis Pullman) are fun to watch, but have almost no character depth. And daughter Kinsey, though played arguably well by Madison, is so stock she's hard to watch. She weeps her way through the whole movie in every single scene, occasionally smoking a cigarette in her Ramones t-shirt and red flannel, and she has no express reason for her antisocial, resentful behavior. None of the characters is very smart, either, which doesn't help. Granted, they're more cautious and thoughtful than many horror protagonists, but in this case their introspective terror is what hurts them. They should be running, getting weapons, or even getting in their damn car instead of splitting up, hiding in plain sight, not checking their surroundings, and not communicating with each other.
It's sometimes irritating and often too familiar, but Prey at Night isn't a bad way to spend 90 minutes. At least, not if you like misanthropic horror flicks with some really gruesome, sadistic deaths. Plus, it's got a downright great sequence where Luke fights two of the killers at once in the park pool, illuminated by neon palm trees and backed by "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on the speakers. Go figure, the director of a shark movie shows off his skills in a water scene.
IMDb: The Strangers: Prey at Night
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