This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Stranger Danger II
Plot Overview
In the first installment
of this trilogy, “The Strangers:
Chapter 1,” a hapless couple after five years together
takes a scenic route through Oregon heading to Portland for a
job interview. Their car breaks down along the way, so they spend
the night at one Bob's Airbnb waiting for parts from Eugene. Three
murderous masked men assault them leaving them for dead.
New Yorker Maya (Madelaine Petsch,) though, has survived and wakes
up in a rinky-dink hospital there in Venus and calls her sister who
orders an ambulance to take her to a real hospital in Pdx. Word of her survival spreads through
the grapevine from Carol's Diner. The three killers get wind
of it and stalk her through a near-deserted hospital, then through
the wild woods, and back to Bob's. They kill any inconvenient
witnesses and set us up for chapter three.
Having migrated to Oregon in troubled
times, I can somewhat relate to Maya's misadventure. I was
chased down from the hills above Boulder, Colo. by a pack of wild dogs. My hippie companions
did not always prove reliable. I worried a lot about my Penna. draft board. Maya from New York
puts me in mind of a character in a Daniel Eisenberg autobiography:
His family came of pioneer stock. On the living room wall were portraits of his grandparents, rugged characters who had come by covered wagon from New York State to Illinois, and then to Wisconsin in pioneer days. The grandfather had fought under Andrew Jackson. In Illinois the grandmother, home alone on a farm when a band of raiding Indians came, routed them with three shotguns, (276)
Ideology
The unanswered
question from the first part, of why the killers were doing
this (“'Cause you're here”) is tackled in flashbacks
to childhood. A drift of piglets has been taught to come to a
boy swineherd. Years later as a mature boar one of them gets
frisky with Maya discovered in the woods. It's different, a piggy
nipping at a kid's heels and a tusked beast taking a chunk out of
her leg. Similarly, a boy back then breaking the neck of a pet rodent
(off camera) grows up to commit serious crime.
The elementary school kids played a kissing game. Responding to the correct password w/a knock, a schoolgirl opens the shed's door and kisses the fellow standing there. She says, “That was fun; let's do it again.” This time, however, a second girl stands there with the boy who (off camera) bludgeons the inside girl with a smooth stone. The class and teacher come running, but it being a private school they do not involve the outside authorities. Grown, the kids get a third participant, but the locals don't involve the state police in their growing crime spree.
The apostle Paul enjoins temperance in one's Christian walk the way sports participants employ it. (1Cor. 9:24-25) “Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.” Sure, it's part of heterosexual socialization for kids to play kissing games, but one kiss will do. Makeout sessions can be reserved to when they're older, old enough to date. Maya and her beau of five years can be expected to make out, but not sleep together; that should wait until they are actually married. And Sheriff Rotter (Richard Brake) tells Deputy Walters (Pedro Leandro) to think twice about calling the staties for help to solve their “10 … 15 … murders … who's counting?” 'cause they might have some questions why he didn't arrest so-and-so with whom he was having an affair. Temperance in fraternization can save us all a lot of trouble.
The
King James Version (KJV)
of 1611 enjoined temperance in, Acts
24:24-25, 1Cor. 9:25, Gal. 5:23, Titus
1:7-8, Titus 2:2, and 2Peter 1:5-6. When the KJV was (needlessly in my opinion) updated
by the ASV in
1900, temperance was left in. In his
diary at about the turn of the
20th century, Orthodox Saint John of Kronstadt enjoined temperance.
Temperance is part of the Catholic catechism as well.
Nevertheless, it has been reinterpreted by many modern
Bible translators as self-control so as not to confuse
the common man who since Prohibition in the 1920s has come to regard
temperance as applicable only to drink. My Concise Thesaurus has
“sober adj. temperate. A person who is sober is not drunk. A temperate person exercises
moderation and self-restraint and for that reason is unlikely to drink
to excess.” (170) Modern Protestant Bibles such as RSV (1952),
and later NKJV, ESV & NIV now read “self-control”
where Bibles used to read “temperance.” Yet, for example,
California Gov. Gavin Newsom in
a March, 2024 interview extolling President Biden, said: “We
have American manufacturing coming back home, all because of Biden's
wisdom, because of his temperance, his capacity to lead in a bipartisan
manner—” Bipartisan leadership is by nature temperate.
The Jubilee 2000 Bible still uses temperance. It's
valid for more than drink.
According to Porter G. Perrin, Index to English: The
Meaning of Words 3b. Synonyms. A synonym is a word of nearly
the same meaning as another. … There are very few pairs
of interchangeable words.
(192) And according to Fowler,
“Synonyms, in the narrowest sense, are separate words
whose meaning, both denotation & connotation, is so fully identical
that one can always be substituted for the other without change
in the effect of the sentence in which it is done. Whether any such
perfect synonyms exist is doubtful.” According to Professor
George P. Marsh in an 1859 postgraduate lecture on the English
Bible of 1611: “Words and ideas are so inseparably connected,
they become in a sense connatural, that we cannot change the
one without modifying the other. … A new translation of the Bible,
therefore, or an essential modification of the existing [KJV] version,
is substantially a new book, a new Bible, another revelation.”
(454)
This slasher movie under review features a hospital escapee who uses self-control to stifle any scream as she ghosts through the deserted hallways of the institution pursued by a murderous masked figure. After that she uses self-control to jump from a moving vehicle. She uses self-control to sew up her contusions sans anesthesia. In general she's just got to keep her wits about her.
I was going to a church that used pre-Prohibition Bibles. Now I go to one using post-Prohibition. The former were all about temperance, the latter about self-control. They apply to different parts of my Friday movie. Bible marketers excuse gratuitous changes—yet necessary to obtain a copyright—saying they make little difference, but I have my doubts.
Production Values
“” (2025) was directed by Renny Harlin; he also directed the first film. The screenplay was written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland. It stars Madelaine Petsch who was most credibly frightened. Speech was minimal.
MPA rated it R for bloody violence, and language. The tension is protracted. The audience can be expected to return. It has a country music soundtrack with classics by Willie Nelson & Don Williams. It has a runtime of 1 hour 38 minutes.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
It did nothing to calm my nerves to be living in Oregon with woodland wildlife and city crazies. When I lived by a park, cougars would come investigate my neighbor's chickens. Now that I live downtown the homeless howl outside my window at night. Maybe I can escape to a good movie, but this wouldn't be the one.
Movie Ratings
Action factor: Well done action flick. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Well done special effects. Video Occasion: Fit For a Friday Evening. Suspense: Don't watch this movie alone. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Unless otherwise noted, scripture is quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software, print.
Biden, Joe. Quoted from Jack Birle's article, “Gavin Newsom calls Biden's age a ‘gift’ rather than a liability.” In The Washington Examiner. Web, radio.
Eisenberg, Daniel M. As Told to John Nicholas Beffel. I Find the Missing. Copyright © 1938 by Daniel Eisenberg and John Nicholas Beffel. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. Print.
Fowler, H.W., A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. USA: Oxford UP. 1946. Print.
Marsh, George P. “Disturbance
of Formulas.”
Lectures on the English
Language. London: John Murray, 1863. Print.
——available to read
or download at www.bibles.n7nz.org.
Perrin, Porter G. Index to English. Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1939. Print.
The Right Word II. A Concise Thesaurus. Based on the New American Heritage Dictionary. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1983. Print.
Sergieff, Archpriest John Iliytch. My Life in Christ. or Moments of Spiritual Serenity and Contemplation, of Reverent Feeling, of Earnest Self-Amendment, and Peace in God: Extracts from the diary of St. John of Kronstadt (Archpriest John Iliytch Sergieff). Translated with the author's sanction, from the Fourth and Supplemental Edition by E.E. Goulaeff. St. Petersburg. Jordansville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 2000. Print.
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