Woof.

I don’t really feel like I’m an analogy guy – I’m probably more of the rambling blatherer guy who doesn’t use enough commas and makes no sense and probably irritated your skin with some rash but I feel like this intro cones with a two parter true life story. Part 1 is about how I grew up tall very quickly and I’ve always had weak ankles and knees and I was super skinny for a long time and I’ve barely ever been able to really walk great much less run because I’m tall and slow and my knees knock together and I fall down and it’s truly a TRAGEDY in the purest truest sense and now I’m older and fatter and running anywhere would be such a bad idea that even one night a few months ago I was talking to my friend and we’d had a bunch of beer and I was all “we should go ring someone’s doorbell and run away” and he said “have you ever seen yourself run” and I realized it was the truth and I shut that idea down immediately.

Part 2 here revolves around the fact that where I live there’s a sport for people like me called ‘slow pitch softball’ when consists mainly of more or less out of shape people drinking hot beer out in the sun and running around trying to be athletic like we were once back in our teens and 20s. Usually these are summer time leagues so people who work 8-5 jobs during the week can get some recreation on the weekends – and where I live it very regularly gets over 100F each day during the summer. The point is that these slow pitch softball leagues are often called beer leagues and most of the people out there are trying stay hydrated by drinking crappy and stale beer and trying to find some shade. So I’m slow and I can’t run and I’m not very agile or even that athletic but I can put back a lot of beer and one night I ——> hit a home run. It didn’t go over the fence because I’m not that strong but I was able to round all of the bases because —-> the outfielder fell down —-> twice. He misjudged the ball in the air when I hit it and fell down going to catch it and it rolled to the fence and he fell down again when he went to get it. As you can imagine I was about to die when I made it to the dugout but after all of that —-> it is my concern that Renny Harlin is that outfielder and has drunkenly fallen down twice in the direction of these two movies and if the third is anything like these I’ll have to tell the sorry story about how I pooped my pants while playing first base one hot and blistery afternoon.

As The Strangers go, I didn’t really love the first one because of they whole “because you were here” lazyass gimmick but I kind of loved Prey At Night and then Harlin’s first one of these came out and I didn’t care for it at all but I thought the lead actress they cast here had a great horror movie scared face and wished her the best of luck, I think I might have also mentioned how it amazes me how people that live in a city think people that live in areas with trees can somehow make zero sound when walking through hundreds of feet of leaves and sticks and that they must all levitate or something because most of the stuff in the woods there made no fucking sense. I also think I disliked the toothless tobacco chewing hillbilly car and truck repairman who never announces his presence to anyone and just shows up standing outside your car window staring at you with his mouth wide open holding a tire iron probably. “Ah shit!” You say startled to the point of emission at seeing this surprise when you weren’t expecting it. “Me no fix carburetor. Me no have parts. Me no know how to knock on window. Me dumb.” Says the stereotype most people have of other people. “Me butt itchy” he says pulling down his greasy overalls and running the pointy end of the tire iron up and down his crack. “Me use leaves after poopy.” Hopefully you get my point and we don’t need any more from Dumb Mechanic Guy.

This movie starts off right after the first one and our good scared face actress is still in the hospital recovering from getting stabbed all over the place and – well wait. So this is some small town in Oregon I think where they have chili eatin’ contests and local dumb mechanic guys and I feel like everyone knows everyone and good scared face lady is in this enormous hospital with tons of hallways to run down and a morgue to hide in and even a room full of containers filled with flammable gas so I’m thinking this is an expensive place to keep up so they probably have high overhead and keep a LOT of the state’s patients in there maybe for specialist like nephrology or dialysis or catheter techs or something to support having such a fancy hospital facility in this small town with one cop but anyway she’s hanging out by herself one night and she hears bumps and scratches in the hall so she rips her IV out and heads out into the completely dark and abandoned halls where no one works after dark and no one comes in to your room EVERY FUCKING HOUR ON THE DOT to check your vitals and blood pressure so you can never really ever get any sleep ever if you’re hospitalized but this one is completely and utterly empty except for the guy with a sack on his head walking around making zero noise. Or maybe he already murdered everybody in this small town with nothing but a place to go do some chili eatin’ and go see a dumb local itch his rashy buttcrack with a metal rod. “Me dumb and make poopy in gooseberry bushes!” He laments.

It’s probably no spoiler that she escapes the abandoned hospital and runs barefoot down a street and on to some sort of farm next door to the empty hospital where someone pulls a rifle on her but is immediately murdered by someone else wandering around on people’s property wearing a mask and murdering everyone. And she escapes that predicament too and almost gets run over by a car full of people you just know have to be the people that wear masks and go around making no noise anywhere and murdering everyone so she jumps out of the moving truck and rolls down a hill and stitches herself up and gets attacked by a wild boar as soon as the sun comes up. And it keeps going on like this until –

this movie is filled with flashbacks or backstory about these kids who will grow up to be the people who make no noise and murder everyone and since we’re fair here, I suppose that was a nice touch but did we really need to know the one lady with the Betty Boop style mask was a lonely girl who played with baby pigs? Did we? Maybe we all needed that I don’t know but –

she manages to kill the pig and finds a place to hide which is owned by the car full of people we knew were the people who go around making no noise and killing everyone. Or are they who knows because we are shown a couple of them lying in hey look we’re dead poses but I’m not buying it really and soon our girl with the good looking scared face is off running down another road getting chased by a pickup full of people who make no noises and murder everyone. I feel like I’m missing something in that last sequence but it’s probably not that important because she –

you see some boy was watching that day the little girl who would grow up to make no noise and murder people’s pig got killed and he befriended her and gave her solace and a place in his heart because that’s what good kids do in this tiny town in Oregon where you can eat chili and get gooseberry rashes in your dirty butt checks because you shit outside you dumb hillbilly. And not only does he give her his undying love and devotion but they also commit a little murder on another youth for hurting that pig and being a general bitch and nothing says I love you like murde –

as you know it good looking scared lady has up and killed one of them out there on the side of the road! AW SHIT! And because we can put two and two together because we’re half smart and use toilets as much as we can, we recognize that the one who has been killed us scarecrow burlap bag head’s lifelong pig loving girlfriend and I think we’re supposed to be sad for them? Was that the purpose of everything here? To give them purpose and believability? Are we being asked to care about these murdering sons of bitches who go around making no sound anywhere and killing everyone?

Aside from having to tell another poop your pants story, I really hope the third one has some sort of redeeming qualities going for it and in honor of unnecessary flashbacks, here are some glimpses of what’s happened before with Eric Undead, most of them on this very place:

And more recently:

FILED UNDER: I tried the WordPress AI to generate an excerpt for my hone page excerpt thing and this is what it came up with hahahahaha!

Growing up tall and slow, I once dreamed of running away with my friend, but reality set in when I realized I couldn’t keep up. In our hot, summer leagues, I hit a home run, but it wasn’t just about the score. It was about embracing the unexpected and finding humor in the most unlikely places.

Because anyone who might ever read my place here knows that’s exactly what this piece is about.