- Directed by Bryan Bertino
- Written by Bryan Bertino
- Stars Scott Speedman, Liv Tyler, Gemma Ward
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 26 Minutes
Synopsis
There is a 911 call. A couple of little Mormon boys come to an open door and find a murder scene. Credits roll.
Kristen and James come home from a wedding to his house out in the country. She’s crying, and it appears they’ve been arguing. We get a flashback to what happened earlier. He proposed to her, and she shot him down. Awkward! Now, they’re stuck in the country home together at least for tonight. James calls his friend Mike to come and pick him up in the morning.
They are both very sad until someone knocks at the door. At 4 a.m. A woman is at the door asking for Tamara, and James explains that there’s no Tamara there. The woman leaves.
James leaves to get cigarettes and leaves Kristen in the house alone. While he’s gone, she tries on the ring and wonders if she’s made a mistake. There’s another knock at the door. Someone asks, “is Tamara home?” The fire in the fireplace starts to smoke, so she disconnects the smoke detector. She calls James and tells him to hurry up, but then the phone goes dead. We soon see that someone is already inside the house.
Kristen notices that the smoke detector isn’t where she left it and knows that she’s not alone. Meanwhile, someone is still knocking at the door. She finally looks out the window and sees two people in masks.
James comes in, and he didn’t see anything. He says there’s nobody there and obviously doesn’t believe her. They search the house, not noticing her cellphone burning in the fire. They do see the one girl standing a distance from the house, just standing and staring. He goes outside, and the car has been trashed and the tires have been slashed.
They both go outside and try to drive off in the car, even with flat tires, but someone is parked behind them who then accelerates and rams their car. They run back into the house. James finds a shotgun and ammo, but he doesn’t know how to use it.
It’s clear that they’ve been in the bedroom already. The people outside use an axe to cut through the door, Shining style.
Meanwhile, Mike, James’ friend, arrives early to pick him up as planned, but James shoots him by mistake. They both freak out a bit over that, almost forgetting there are bad people in the house.
James tries to go out to the barn to use a radio to call for help, but he runs into trouble outside. Kristen runs outside but hurts her foot and can’t run any more. She makes it to the barn but doesn’t see James out there. The baddies smash the radio, so that’s not gonna help them anyway. Kristen looks around, and she now sees three bad guys and Mike’s car is now on fire.
There’s a lot of cat and mouse action that follows. Finally, one of them knocks Kristen out and drags her away.
The sun comes up, and the three strangers admire the two helpless people tied to chairs. The three take their masks off at last, but we don’t know who they are. They stab James a couple of times, and he dies. Then it’s time for Kristen.
Then we come back to the two Mormon boys who stop by the house in the morning. They pass the trio in the pickup truck on the road. They stop and ask one of the boys for one of their pamphlets… “It’ll be easier next time,” one of them remarks.
Commentary
This is one of those “it could really happen” kind of horror movies, but fortunately it doesn’t happen very often. At no point do we ever find out why the strangers are doing this; just for sick fun, I guess. For a while, I suspected that the big intruder was going to turn out to be James, since James appeared on the scene just a little too conveniently a couple of times, but that’s not the way it went.
The first time the girl came to the door, James said it was 4 a.m. The rest all had to have happened before the sun came up. Also, am I the only one who was bothered by the fact that the tub of ice cream on the kitchen table was open and melting during the whole ordeal?
It was good, probably one of the earliest “home invasion” kind of films which eventually led to films like The Purge and a dozen others.