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He’s the first victim of the film’s crew of killers, referred to in the credits as Dollface (Emma Bellomy), Pin-Up Girl (Lea Enslin), and Man in the Mask (Damian Maffei). A figure known as Uncle Marvin has invited them to camp there for the weekend, but the place is otherwise abandoned - and Marvin, before long, turns out to be a bloody mangled corpse hidden under a sheet.

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Her sarcastic, chain-smoking resentment (though she doesn’t inhale), like her folks’ guilt and despair over what a screw-up their darling daughter turned out to be, amounts to a protracted red herring, as the family heads up to Gatlin Lake, a trailer park full of rolling hills and orangey street lamps. 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.

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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.

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That, however, was five years before “The Purge” (2013) figured out how to turn slasher anarchy into a kind of rebel posture. The killers, in their plastic cherub masks, were spooky specters emerging from the night, and that lent the opening section of the movie a disquieting imitation-J-horror vibe that it all too quickly abandoned. Ten years ago, “The Strangers” offered what looked, for a while, like a slightly more original dose of the same mayhem.

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.