This grim, quick-cut trailer, while somewhat effective in its own
punch-to-the-face fashion, doesn’t do justice to the slow-paced,
much more legitimately unnerving trailer for The Strangers (Rogue, May 30) currently playing in theaters. The movie, seemingly a Vacancy-type killer-thriller, is about a pair of isolated young lovers (Scott Speedman and Liv Tyler) who find themselves under siege from a group (family?) of psychopaths who are perhaps taking a page from the original poster of Michael Haneke’s 1997 version of Funny Games with their choice of headwear. Yeah, the stalk-and-slash quotient of the final product is probably way up there, but the theatrical trailer reminded me a bit of In Cold Blood, actually, and the tense, long hold of a shot with a menacing figure standing silently in the background is virtually unprecedented in current trailer film vocabulary, especially for a genre piece like this. It freaked me out the first time I saw it, precisely because it’s so unexpected.