Published June 7, 2026, 10:15 a.m. ET

This week on Good Money After Bad Theatre is The Strangers: Chapter 3 (now on Starz), the third in a wholly unnecessary trilogy that managed to cram about 58 minutes of story into four-and-a-half hours. Quite the achievement there. I’m sure everyone’s proud. As you may already know, the original 2008 The Strangers stands as a keystone of the home-invasion-thriller sub-genre, memorable for its chillingly simple because-they-were-there murder saga. A sequel didn’t make enough money so the idea was shelved until Renny Harlin signed on to direct a trilogy that would take the original idea and feed it to the meat grinder by fleshing out the who-what-where-when-why backstory of the trio of masked slasher-killers. The result was awful, but Harlin and everyone were committed and had to see it through and now here we are, annoyed and weary, but ultimately happy that it’s all over. 

THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 3: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Chapter 3 picks up right where Chapter 2 left off: Audiences apoplectic with ennui. Oh, and Maya, nickname Jenny Finalgirl (Riverdale’s Madelaine Petsch), killed one of the killers, Pin-up Girl (a.k.a. Girly-Girly-Girl-Girl), during the big un-rousing non-climax. But we don’t open on that fateful night. Oh, no. We start THREE YEARS AGO with a sequence, the first of far too many, that didn’t need to be conceived, written, filmed or edited into the movie. Thank god for that, which means I’m off the hook with a description of one of the least creative slasher-flick kills in cinema history, also the first of far too many of those in this movie. And here we reach the end of the paragraph, having accomplished almost nothing of consequence, absolutely in the spirit of the film.

OK, now we’re back with Maya. She watches from a hidey spot in the forest as Scarecrow (a.k.a. Sackface) and Dollface (a.k.a. Dolly But Not Dolly Parton) find Pin-up Girl’s corpse. Turns out Scarecrow and Pin-up Girl were lovers since they were teens, which we learn in some mystique-obliterating flashbacks. Subsequent scenes find Maya limping around the forest, avoiding Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake), who has one of those names that identifies him as an antagonist. (Sheriff Freshly will probably turn up in Gabby’s Dollhouse 2: The Gabbening.) The two surviving slayers eventually snatch the depressingly easy-to-snatch Maya and take her and the dead slayer’s body back to their cozy sawmill and give poor Pin-up Girl the ol’ end-of-Fargo treatment. 

Meanwhile, Rotter farts around and the narrative awkwardly flashes back a few times and Maya’s sister (Rachel Shenton) arrives with two friends so they can look for Maya and almost certainly end up being fodder for some shockingly unimaginative kills. Amidst all this are multiple instances of long dull silences that are supposed to be tense and suspenseful but in reality sure seem like an attempt to get the film to the 90-minute mark that’s a standard benchmark for feature films. Funniest thing is, as much as Chapter 3 wants us to think it’s an actual feature film, it really is not. Oh, and Scarecrow wants to make Maya his girlfriend and also the third killer because two obviously isn’t enough. She seems reluctant, like Madelaine Petsch should’ve been before signing the contract to star in this slagheap-ready trilogy.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Remember The Divergent Series? Which was supposed to be four movies but ended up only being three because they sucked so bad and nobody cared about them, so they didn’t bother to make the fourth movie and finish the story? The Strangers Trilogy did not learn the same lesson. 

Performance Worth Watching: Good on Brake for capitalizing on one of the most hateful, hateable faces ever. He’s just making use of what the good lord gave him, by gum.

Sex And Skin: None.

Our Take: Just last night I was flim-cricketsplaining to some poor suffering party about how horror is where the medium’s true innovators are cultivating exciting new visual and narrative styles, and experimenting with the form. There are piles and piles of examples that deserve praise, multiple viewings and bigger budgets for their makers: Weapons, Bring Her Back, The Ugly Stepsister, Undertone, Backrooms, Obsession, etc., and those are just from the last 18 months or so. And it’s therefore shocking how regressive and uninspired these Strangers films are, playing like bottom-rung direct-to-VHS junk from the mid-1980s, feeding off the scraps left behind from the slashersplosion era. They all but scream don’t bother to watch us! in our faces. 

However, I can say that Chapter 3 is the best of the trilogy, for what it’s worth, and it’s worth jack squat. It’s still a bleary, wearying trudge from one pointless scene to the next. Perhaps there’s one coherent movie to be hacked together from the three, but even then, there’s still not a single memorable kill to be found — the Scarecrow fella just swings his ax until someone croaks — and these characters function as if they don’t exist on the same time-space continuum as common sense. At least the three films are consistent in the way they feature an upsetting lack of imagination, which is far more upsetting than anything that happens in this conclusive chapter, which TRIES SO HARD to chill yer buns off and disturb your brain, but doesn’t seem to really know how to do that. It can’t muster enough oomph to even be a merciless downer. It’s remarkably inept for a veteran director like Harlin who, never forget, helmed The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. I guess there’s just no following that.

Our Call: Sometimes there’s no beating around the bush. Eloquence be damned: these movies suck. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.