The Horror Show
The Stranger
by Guillermo Amoedo
Why is it that vampires are always so brooding and mopey? Then, the few who aren’t and embrace their gift are always evil? Being a vampire doesn’t have to be a bad thing, tons of movies portray them as being able to sustain themselves off of animals too. They don’t have to be a murderer and can be immortal! What’s so bad about that? Nothing I can think of, but vampires can never seem to be happy. Even in 2014’s The Stranger, the vampires need to take a Prozac and learn to get happy because I refuse to sit through another mopey vampire movie.
Martin, a mysterious man, arrives in a small town looking for his missing wife. He finally finds where she used to live, but he’s too late; his wife, Ana, is dead. At the house, Martin meets a young boy, Peter, who directs Martin to Ana’s grave. Martin starts wallowing on a park bench. A group of kids, led by Caleb, attacks him. Peter witnesses these events and warns a nearby police officer, Lieutenant De Luca. The officer arrives and all the boys but Caleb flee. De Luca is actually Caleb’s father, and the two work together to dispose of the seemingly deceased Martin. Peter once again observes from a distance and follows them to where they dump the body. He finds Martin’s body only to learn he’s in fact still alive. Peter takes Martin to his mom, Monica, who is a nurse. She wants nothing to do with the situation, but Martin just wants to die. He warns the two not to touch his blood as he carries a contagious disease. He then threatens to kill them if they don’t leave him alone. De Luca and Caleb discover Martin’s body is missing, and Caleb decides to pay a visit to Peter’s home. He lights a Molotov cocktail and exclaims he’ll burn the house down if Peter doesn’t come outside. Peter faces his fate and receives a savage beating from the boys. He’s saved by Martin, but peter drops his Molotov and lights himself on fire. De Luca’s son survives but is in critical condition and he kidnaps Peter and threatens to scorch Peter if he doesn’t tell him where he can find Martin. Too bad for Peter, he actually doesn’t know Martin’s whereabouts.
This movie has so many plot holes. The biggest of which is Peter’s relationship to Ana. I’m not going to flag this as spoilers because anyone with half-a-brain will figure it out before the movie tells you. Ana is Peter’s mother, not Monica. Ana is a vampire, like Martin, and she kills herself via sunlight the day Peter is born. Why she does this is never explained in a way that makes sense. Peter never meets Ana, and he doesn’t even know she’s his mother. Yet he knows who Ana is, somehow. When Martin shows up at Peter’s house, he directs Martin to her grave. Why did Monica even tell Peter about Ana in the first place if she was just going to cover up who his real mother is? Also, when Peter talks to Martin for the time he says, “[Ana] doesn’t live here anymore.” Implying she used to live here, and somehow Martin was able to track her down to this address. Yet, in the flashback about Peter’s birth you learn that Monica was the nurse working when Ana died, and she took Peter as her own. Did she have some kind of connection to Ana beside that or was she just some random girl? If you want an answer, you’ll never get one.
Also the writing in this movie is terrible. Let’s go back to when Peter and Martin first meet. Martin, like I said earlier, is looking for Ana. Peter’s exact response is, “She doesn’t live here anymore.” Martin presses further and asks if Peter knows where he can find her. Then, it cuts to a graveyard. Yep, that’s the response I give when someone comes looking for a person I know who is deceased. Why would I tell someone that person is dead, I’ll just direct them to a graveyard and they can put two and two together on their own. Let’s waste everyone’s time!
The movie also makes cheesy, poorly written cuts like that all the time. The audience sees the graveyard and is supposed to say, “Oh no, she’s dead.” In another scene Lt. De Luca looks down at his five year sobriety chip, and in the next scene you immediately see him with a bottle of liquor. That’s just tacky writing, they don’t subtly allude to anything, it’s very in-your-face. Another example to crappy writing is the movie’s inability to explain anything, the movie insists on itself. Just because a character says something in this movie, we’re all supposed to faithfully believe it. Martin believes that Ana was the stronger of the two of them. Why does he believe this? Because she killed herself for some poorly explained reason about being a vampire. Why is being a vampire so bad though? Because Martin tells us being a vampire is bad. Since, Ana was the strong one, that makes Martin the weak one right? Well, everything in this movie tells me otherwise. Martin doesn’t want to spread the curse and he’s willing to kill anyone potentially infected. He was even willing to kill Ana when she showed her inability to resist eating humans, even after she said that she was pregnant. Martin wasn’t going to risk bringing another vampire into the world. Ana as we’ve seen, is unable to control her bloodthirst. She is so unwilling to control her bloodthirst that she kills herself instead of braving through it and raising her own son. Clearly, Ana was the weak one and Martin was the strong one. However, because The Stranger tells us Ana is the strong one that means she is.
Also, the movie is vague about whether or not the average person knows about vampires. We know by the events at the beginning of the movie that Martin is the last (once again because Martin tells us he is the last), despite the fact that Martin is not an omnipotent being and has no way of knowing if other vampires exist somewhere else on a planet of seven billion people. When Ana killed that girl in their apartment, the brother came back looking for revenge. His dialogue implied he may have known about vampires, and immediately knows they’re responsible for his sister’s death, rather quickly at that. She had only been dead for moments before he finds out and would have had to break into their apartment to even find the body to confirm that. That would imply that he may have been already suspicious of their true nature. Monica also may or may not know vampires exist. When she recaps Ana’s death, she says that nobody knew what happened to her, I took this to mean her death was a mystery. Martin replies informing her that Ana was sick. She confesses that she knows but Peter is healthy and not a danger to anyone. She then accuses Martin of being the dangerous one. In the flashback, when Ana hands her baby to Monica just before sunrise, Monica asks if she should close the curtains. Ana replies no and that she would like to watch the sunrise. It’s all very contradictory. If Monica knew, as she claims she does, she should have known leaving the curtains open would have killed Ana. Yet, Monica also claims that no one knows what happened to her. It’s pretty obvious. Monica also acts surprised anytime she witness Martin do something supernatural, such as using his blood to heal Peter’s wounds. The movie just can’t seem to keep anything straight at all.
This is a movie I want to like, but I just can’t. It’s a poorly written mess that is overall very uninteresting. The movie doesn’t carry the vampire genre forward at all, but relies on tired clichés to reinforce in its redundancy. Writer-director Guillermo Amoedo also wrote Knock Knock and The Green Inferno, neither of which I’ve seen but did express some interest in before watching this mess. After learning of this news, I’m much more hesitant to watch either of these movies, fearing it’ll be just as tiring. I think the biggest flaw this movie had was its inability to keep any information straight. I swear this movie will one moment say that sky is blue and you’re like cool, then the next it’s like, “No, it’s actually red.” You’re then like, “But you just said it’s blue.” The movie gets angry and shouts, “No, I didn’t. It’s my story don’t tell me what’s in my story.” That’s exactly what it felt like watching this movie. Anyway, I’m going to stop kicking a dead horse. It’s just safe to say, I won’t be letting The Stranger back into my home any time soon.
Billy Wayne Martin, HMS
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