Slaughter, rinse, repeat.

There’s a gag at the start of a Family Guy episode [season 9, episode 10: Friends Of Peter G] where Peter Griffin goes to the movies and is repeatedly fooled by ever more elaborate studio idents into thinking the movie has begun. The Strangers: Chapter 2 goes one better by actually starting the movie in between studio idents. Second chapters have quite the reputation, with The Empire Strikes Back, Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and The Godfather Part II routinely eclipsing their forebears. In this respect, The Strangers: Chapter 2 doesn’t go one better so much two worse.

Madelaine Petsch returns as Maya, horror’s least interesting Final Girl who, by the time this second film has finished, we still no next to nothing about. She’s not so much a character but a placeholder, a Sisyphean sacrifice to an endless cycle of chase, hide, repeat. Time and again, when her interests and safety would best be served by remaining where she is, she emerges from hiding, makes a run for it or fidgets enough to cause a noise that draws the attention of The Strangers. It’s like watching someone consistently lose hide-and-seek in the best possible venue against the worst seekers in horror history.

The Strangers: Chapter 2 doesn’t really have a plot, per se, beyond Maya going on an inexplicable tour of the first film’s locations and ensuring that any well-meaning folk she meets along the way end up as meat for the grinder. And for a film series where the randomness of the acts of violence is meant to be the point, it sure does invest a lot of time in filling out the backstories of the killers themselves – and even improbably their pet killer warthog. Hakuna Matata, I guess. By the time the film’s finished tripping over itself to show you the killers’ past and padding with recap clips from The Strangers: Chapter 1, you begin to suspect that the genuinely new material barely runs to 45 minutes. Less, if you count the footage the trailer gave away.

Repetitious to the point of exasperation, The Strangers: Chapter 2 is so dedicated to its rinse and repeat formula that you start to feel a grudging sympathy for the would-be woodland killers as they continually Wile-E-Coyote themselves as Maya improbably Roadrunners herself out of every situation. The only mildly interesting thing it does is completely invert the usual slasher structure. The first thirty to forty minutes are a relentless (except for the flashbacks) and repetitive breakneck sequence of narrow escapes from hospital to woodland to farmhouse before the film grinds to a halt for long periods of quiet close-ups and meaningless stares.

There are flickers of craft here and there; after all Harlin’s no slouch in the director’s chair, but he’s really phoning it in with this one and the phone lines have been cut. The Strangers: Chapter 2 ends up being a film so focussed on whether you’ve seen the first one it forgets to do anything that might make you want to see a third one.