I saw the recent reviews for The Strangers: Chapter 1 that claimed it had ruined the franchise. Out of curiosity, I watched the original, and I don't understand. This franchise never was good to begin with. I am baffled as to how a movie can be worse than this. I gave this movie an obligatory +1 because of Dennis from Always Sunny, but honestly, I wanted to give it a 1/10. Let's get this out of the way; I watched this movie next to a few other home invasion movies like Hush and You're Next, and it's just glaring how much worse this one is, especially compared to the latter. There is absolutely no intrigue around the villains in this movie, and they serve a completely nihilistic fear of violent crime I guess (the movie even opens with a stat on this). I guess if you watch a lot of Fox news, this ethereal threat might be enough to scare you. However, because they have no personality or backstory, they are completely uninteresting. It doesn't help that the "kills" and presence of them is incredibly poor, with only the masks doing any sort of heavy lifting. In fact, with two central protagonists only, the movie is just this incredibly slow cat and mouse game that drags without any sort of interesting cinematography, soundtrack, acting, etc. It's essentially like watching paint dry, and you already know how the movie will end more or less from the get go because the protagonists don't even try to fight back in any way. They try to fill this void with some sort of underdeveloped relationship drama between the two characters, but it's incredibly simplistic and goes nowhere. There are no deep secrets, complex motivations, or even basic character development. It's just window dressing to eat up time to justify the rest of this movie. This movie cannot decide what it wants to be, but it's essentially terrible in every facet. It's not funny, not scary, not thematically driven, not well-made, not well-acted, not a complex analysis of a relationship under pressure, not anything. Just watch You're Next instead.