In this movie the strangers are two British men, who meet Americans, Jim and Julie, and decide they are going to take them out to show them a good time. Since they are British apparently they can be trusted. This is obviously not true as they end up fighting, well at least Julie, for their live and their sanity.
The idea behind the movie is a good one, as who has ever heard of a ghost house, to keep the spirits at bay? It traps souls that need to be trapped, but if you remove something from the ghost house you are letting the evil soul into your life.
Now, Julie is tricked into this, and if she hadn’t been as mad at her fiancé as she was then maybe life would have moved on and everything would have been fantastic. However, then there would be no movie. Julie is slowly driven mad but the ghost of a Japanese woman who was killed in a fire she set, a fire she set to kill her husband and his mistress. She was the only one who died, which causes her to be a vengeful spirit, with zero care in the world.
As Jim tried to find a way to help or save Julie and every step he takes seems to make things worse for her. The ending of the movie is somewhat predictable, as it really only go in one of two ways, but as things move along the audience sees that it really can only go one way.
This wasn’t an awful movie, but it wasn’t great either. Some of the characters were well written, including the crazy, old, white hippie who is there for the crazy “hey let’s go see a witch doctor” moments. Why is it always the old hippies who know all the secret weird witch doctors?
Not this was better than a few movies I have watched in the past, most notably the movie Pandemic, which was just terrible. This movie did have elements of horror and suspense, but it does make me wonder why white people go all over the world desecrating things that they know will come back to haunt them, possess them, or kill them.
So is this a great movie, no, but is it watchable, yeah. It does have some interesting elements, and if you are a white person, traveling to a different country, please, for the love of all that is holy, don’t touch anything that looks like it shouldn’t be touched!