"The Strangers": That bump in the night sounds familiar

While it scores a few technical bonus points as a well-crafted bump-in-the-night thriller, "The Strangers" can't escape the been-there, done-that feeling of déjà vu that permeates its chilling tale of domestic terror and random, senseless violence.

First-time writer-director Bryan Bertino is a talent to watch, and he shares Roman Polanski's knack (in "Knife in the Water," "Repulsion" and "Rosemary's Baby") for mixing sadness and dread in opening scenes that skillfully set the tone for escalating terror.

The downside is that Bertino relies too heavily on occasionally nonsensical terror tricks that every horror buff has seen a million times since John Carpenter's "Halloween" set the standard for domestic fright-night mayhem. "The Strangers" is an admirable exercise in technique, but it's a bit too anemic to qualify as a satisfying movie.

Inspired by a true incident that occurred on the night of Feb. 11, 2005, the film begins when Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler) and would-be fiancé James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) return from a wedding to the Hoyt family's remote summer home (filmed on a well-chosen location in South Carolina). She has just rejected his marriage proposal, and their mutual anguish (he was clearly expecting a "yes") turns into simmering anxiety and then abject terror when three masked strangers begin to terrorize them, first from outside and then in the house as well.

There's no motive or purpose to the violence that follows, but Bertino handles it with adequate panache, favoring subtle, economical frights over in-your-face terror. And while Tyler and Speedman make an appealing couple on screen, their characters are victims of bad movie logic, forced into danger that sharper plotting would've avoided.

To be fair, movies like "The Strangers" don't operate on logic; they're all about mood, tension and the constant threat of death. To that end, Bertino makes excellent use of sound effects and a brooding, atmospheric score by avant-garde musical duo tomandandy.

But we've seen all this before, right up to the obligatory final-shot shock that's as phony as it is familiar.

Jeff Shannon: j.sh@verizon.net