Posts Tagged ‘Bailee Madison’

CTVNEWS.CA: THE CROUSE REVIEW LOOKS AT “A WRINKLE IN TIME” & MORE!

A weekly feature from from ctvnews.ca! The Crouse Review is a quick, hot take on the weekend’s biggest movies! This week Richard looks at“A Wrinkle in Time,” “The Strangers: Prey At Night” and “Meditation Park.”

Watch the whole thing HERE !

RICHARD’S WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FROM CP24! FRIDAY MARCH 9, 2018.

Richard and CP24 anchor Nick Dixon have a look at the weekend’s new movies including “A Wrinkle in Time” starring Oprah Winfrey, the horror film “The Strangers: Prey At Night” and the dark comedy “Gringo” featuring break-out comedic work from David Oyelowo.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

RICHARD’S CTV NEWSCHANNEL WEEKEND MOVIE REVIEWS FOR MARCH 9.

Richard sits in with CTV NewsChannel anchor Marcia MacMillan  to have a look at the weekend’s big releases, the highly anticipated “A Wrinkle in Time” starring Oprah Winfrey, the horror film “The Strangers: Prey At Night” and the dark comedy “Gringo” featuring break-out comedic work from David Oyelowo.

Watch the whole thing HERE!

Metro: Christina Hendricks relishes in the chills of The Strangers: Prey at Night.

By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada

Christina Hendricks is thankful for a warm jacket. “I was shooting on a mountain only hours ago,” she says on the line from Calgary. “It is below zero but they are doing a great job of keeping me warm. Those parkas are no joke.”

The Knoxville, Tenn., native hasn’t called to talk about the weather in Canada, however. She’s on the phone to discuss her new film, the creepy killer flick The Strangers: Prey at Night.

The former Mad Men star plays a mother who moves her family to a remote community in an effort to put some distance between her daughter and the bad influences of the city. There’s no one around except for three masked psycho killers, Dollface, Man in the Mask and Pin-Up Girl who emerge from the woods with knives, axes and bad intentions.

The creep-fest is a sequel of sorts to The Strangers, a 2008 home invasion film that saw the masked marauders attack an unsuspecting family. It’s also one of Hendricks’ favourite movies.

“I am a huge, huge fan,” she says. “I’ve talked about it for years. I think it is the scariest movie I have ever seen in my life and I reference it all the time. It was coincidental that they came to me. My manager said, ‘I don’t know if you are interested in doing a horror film about The Strangers.’ And I screamed, ‘The Strangers! Are you kidding me?’”

She says the villains of The Strangers: Prey at Night unsettle her more than Dracula, Frankenstein or anything that goes bump in the night because there’s nothing supernatural about them. But at the same time there’s nothing natural about the horrors the all-too-human monsters unleash on the newcomers.

“It’s my absolute worst nightmare,” she says, “people messing with you just because. It’s not a devil thing. It’s not a monster thing. It is not an apocalypse. It is just people coming to mess with you because they can.”

The film was shot in rural Kentucky. “It is beautiful during the day but when the sun goes down it is scary,” she says. “Everything is scarier in the dark.

“I thought, ‘Certainly I won’t be that scared. I know what’s going on,’ but I was actually scared. In the moments before we had to get ourselves worked up so Bailee (Madison, who plays her daughter) and I would go off to a different area and gear ourselves up before they yelled action. You can’t turn it on immediately. You have to get yourself in that state but in between we got along so well. We listened to music and had a laugh.”

She says she enjoyed everyone on set but didn’t hang out with the entire cast.

“They did keep a little bit more separate,” she says of the actors playing the masked killers.

“In the beginning we even said, ‘Can we not see them in their masks until the last moment?’ because they are so scary. It is kind of hard to be chatting and hanging out and having a snack with Dollface and the next thing you know she says, ‘I’m just going to go over here and kill you!’ ‘OK! I’ll see you in a minute.’ A little mystery helps.”

THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT: 2 ½ STARS. “goes too heavy on the sadism.”

Movies like “The Strangers: Prey at Night” unsettle me more than stories featuring Dracula, Frankenstein or anything other thing that goes bump in the night because there’s nothing supernatural going on. At the same time there’s nothing natural about the horrors unleashed by the all-too-human monsters of this film.

The story gets underway when parents Cindy (Christina Hendricks) and Mike (Martin Henderson) load their teens Kinsey (Bailee Madison) and Luke (Lewis Pullman) into the car, on the way to a new life. Leaving the city behind, they’re off to Gatlin Lake, a small community that empties out after Labour Day. The change is an attempt to separate Kinsey from the bad influences surrounding her in the city. You know Kinsey is a rebellious teen because she wears an off the shoulder Ramones T-shirt and smokes cigarettes.

Arriving at their new home, a deserted trailer park, the kids are immediately bored as the parents try and make the best of an uncomfortable situation. Things get lively when three masked psycho killers—Dollface (Emma Bellomy), Man in the Mask (Damian Maffei) and Pin-Up Girl (Lea Enslin)—emerge from the woods with knives, axes and bad intentions. From that point on this becomes a movie where people make terrible decisions and frequently scream, “Leave us alone!”

The spooky opening, complete with anxiety inducing music, a bit of murder and a title card claiming the tale you are about to see is “based on true events,” sets up the film’s uneasy atmosphere. However, the movie never gets to the point where it is actually scary. Instead, it is a queasy-making experience that stems from the idea of people doing awful things for no reason. It’s nihilism. Bad things just happen and that’s the creepy part. “Why are you doing this?” Kinsey shrieks. “Why not?” mumbles Dollface.

The jump scares are secondary to the notion of the ruthless faceless murderers. The family is generic, just victims waiting to be taken. The villains are the stars, even though their faces are covered and they barely speak. They’re not thrill killers. They don’t seem to take much pleasure in their work despite their penchant for listening to syrupy pop music and leaving a bloody happy face symbol at the scene of their crimes. They are primal evil, nothing more.

“The Strangers: Prey at Night” is one note. Summed up in one line it’s, “Unstoppable killers do dreadful things to wide-eyed victims.” Like the first film in this franchise—2008’s “The Strangers”—it’s tight, only 85 minutes long, and values suspense over gore but goes too heavy on the sadism.