\n<\/p>\n
E<\/span>very now and then, Hollywood comes across a hit that can\u2019t be neatly replicated, a one-off success story that should be praised, noted and promptly left well alone. The Strangers wasn\u2019t supposed to do all that much back in 2008, released almost two years after it was made on the cheap, pushed around the schedule like it was toxic waste. But it was a surprise summer sleeper, making almost 10 times its budget and quickly entering the horror iconography hall of fame, with its nightmarishly mismatched masked villains and the chillingly hollow \u201cBecause you were home\u201d non-explanation.<\/p>\n A tortured decade of stop-start attempts to make a follow-up finally resulted in 2018\u2019s underwhelming remix The Strangers: Prey at Night, a sequel entirely devoid of the clammy tension that made the original so unbearably effective. That really should have been the last hurrah but, inevitably it was not, a three-part reboot kicking off last year with The Strangers: Chapter 1, a rubbishy Slovakia-filmed do-over only outdone for head-smashing pointlessness by its sequel, which flopped in and out of cinemas last month (I would expect the third to go straight to streaming). All of this started with writer-director Bryan Bertino, whose post-Strangers career has been similarly awkward, with projects scrapped (including a Sam Raimi-produced horror called The Man) and non-entities like Mockingbird and The Monster failing to register with even the most devoted of horror fans. He had a little bit more luck with 2020\u2019s grim rural horror The Dark and the Wicked but it hasn\u2019t been the ascent of a bold new voice in the genre that many had expected and his latest is a disappointing reminder of exactly what\u2019s been lost since 2008.<\/p>\n Vicious was supposed to be something of a comeback, a major studio horror with a wide summer release and a concept that should easily make it franchise-ready. But after its August date was quietly cancelled, the film is now tumbling on to Paramount+ instead, likely to be lost in the Halloween streaming glut.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Like The Strangers, in another attempt to recapture a shred of that film\u2019s success, it\u2019s about an unwanted visitor and a late-night bang on the door. This time on the receiving end is Polly (Dakota Fanning), a woman trying to get her life together a little later than those around her, living alone in a family-owned home beyond her means, struggling to mature into her 30s. On the other side is a mysterious older woman (Kathryn Hunter) who lies her way inside before presenting Polly with a box, something you really don\u2019t want to be presented with in a horror film. She explains that in order to survive the night, she has to give it something she loves, something she hates and something she needs.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a set-up that raises a box-load of questions yet Bertino isn\u2019t able to elegantly answer them, leaving us unmoored as the chaos begins. By the time the box opens, we\u2019re also a little bored, a slow build that\u2019s a little too<\/em> slow, limply introducing Fanning\u2019s stock fuck-up character, complete with tattooed arms, bottle of wine and ice-cream straight from the tub (never a good sign!). Bertino is a skilled conjurer of atmosphere and he makes the most of the darkness surrounding her (a suburban street over more remote isolation also makes for a refreshing change) but the gimmick at the centre of Vicious just isn\u2019t sticky or scary enough to rival other, more proficient, adjacent horrors like Drag Me to Hell or The Ring or Smile or some of the better Saw movies. It\u2019s so loosely constructed \u2013 the threat is coming from where, the penalty for failure is what, the powers of the box go how far \u2013 that it\u2019s hard to know what\u2019s happening and why we should care.<\/p>\n In place of suspense or dread, Bertino gives us gore, the only real element connecting the title to the film, and it\u2019s certainly nasty enough to provoke a reaction, at least in the moment. But there\u2019s only so much cutting and hacking and stabbing that can distract from unsure writing that isn\u2019t taking us anywhere or really pushing us into pondering the uneasy moral questions at its centre. Even at 98 minutes, the film feels bloated, a last act of teasing, anticlimactic non-endings proving tiresome and ultimately incoherent, as if Bertino was doing panicked rewrites while he shoots (it\u2019s very, very clear why this one was denied a theatrical release). Fanning is a more committed, if still not entirely convincing, final girl than she was in last summer\u2019s silly fairy horror The Watchers but the novelty of watching Hunter do her all-in over-the-top genre bit has truly worn off, fatigue setting in halfway through last year\u2019s genuinely atrocious bodily fluid-driven flop The Front Room. There\u2019s a similarly exhausting excess to her performance here.<\/p>\n Bertino doesn\u2019t need to give us another Strangers, and we certainly do not need anything else in that particular universe, but he needs to give us something more striking, and certainly stranger, than Vicious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every now and then, Hollywood comes across a hit that can\u2019t be neatly replicated, a one-off success story that should be praised, noted and promptly left well alone. The Strangers wasn\u2019t supposed to do all that much back in 2008, released almost two years after it was made on the cheap, pushed around the schedule<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":27072,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1922,8822,16199,4162,16197,1930,386,16198,1085,6238],"class_list":{"0":"post-27071","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-box","9":"tag-dakota","10":"tag-dud","11":"tag-evil","12":"tag-fannings","13":"tag-films","14":"tag-horror","15":"tag-openandshut","16":"tag-review","17":"tag-vicious"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27071"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27071\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}