This past Tuesday, my best friend and I, accompanied by her sisters, went to see “The Strangers: Chapter One”. While I usually love going to the movies completely blind about a film, I wish I’d read up on this one first. Seeing this movie felt like a waste of my time and money. At just 90 minutes, this film calls upon previous franchise tropes and does nothing new with them. The actors did their best but couldn’t save a bad script. This whole movie felt like a prologue to another movie. You know those scenes in some horror movies that show the killer killing before they meet the full crew of the film? Yeah, the WHOLE movie felt like those (typically) short intros. The antagonists had very little presence or character, which may be a part of the shtick, but when you’re three films into a franchise, you need to do something different. At least Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street gave you a reason to keep watching their movies even if the later sequels are all pretty bad. This film did nothing for me. I sat in our empty theater, eating my overpriced movie theater food, wishing I’d gone and seen literally anything else. How this is supposed to start another trilogy– I’m not sure. However, the lighting and visuals were pretty decent, and the costume and set design were pretty great. This film’s problem lies within the script. It’s just so boring and feels like it’s been done a million times. The other two The Strangers films were pretty damn good, but they fumbled with this one. If it wasn’t for that fact, the newest entry would become a stranger to me, that’s for sure.