The Strangers/Wall Banger

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


The Strangers is chock-full of Wall Bangers!

  • First, we have the leading lady being terrified by nothing more than knocks; then the boyfriend arrives, sees her almost in shock, and doesn't believe her.
  • Then the best friend arrives after a while and sees destruction; his own windshield is destroyed, loud music comes from the house... His answer? Call the police? No, that's too easy. Go inside and get killed? You got it...
  • Then the house has been easily broken into and the guy... tells his girlfriend to stay there while he goes to call for help on the radio. What a trio of morons.
    • To expand on the last one, the couple had a shotgun and some ammo; the three villains had an axe and two knives. The couple had holed up in the bedroom with the shotgun facing the only entrance, and so it was game over in the short term because there was no way for the villains to come in without getting shot. The guy decided to go for the radio, which is fair enough—if they just stayed, there would still be the problem of eventually falling asleep. But going on his own was a bad idea for both of them. If Liv Tyler had gone with him, she could have helped him keep an eye out for the villains, and made sure they didn't sneak up on him and grab the gun. Instead, she was left a sitting duck—alone, with no weapon and with the villains almost certainly knowing her location. That they didn't kill her there and then was most likely just because they were doing all this For the Evulz and didn't want the fun to end yet.
    • The shotgun is a good point. If you have a gun and the bad guys don't, you can just walk out to the street and keep right on walking until you get somewhere safe.
  • To make matters worse, this movie has a "based on true events" tag, but the way the story unfolds, there's no way that even the best detectives could have come up with that level of detail, especially with details like the masks.

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