Random From Redbox: The Intruders Review

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With this Random From Redbox entry, I kept to the theme of choosing a movie I hadn’t heard of or seen before, but this time I wanted to watch something that I knew was going to be bad. Victor and the Secret of Crocodile Mansion turned out to be a pretty decent movie, so I had to mix things up a bit. As I was scrolling through the movies available to me, I saw Miranda Cosgrove’s face on the cover of what looked to be a horror movie. The Intruders was the title (a title I would later learn makes very little sense) and I wasted no time before choosing it as my next random cinematic adventure. Luckily for me, my instincts were spot-on. The Intruders is not a very good movie at all.
I’ll be honest, I had a little bit of hope that Miranda Cosgrove would carry this film and give a performance that wasn’t godawful, but to my amusement/disappointment, the most convincing emotion we ever get out of her is a disappointed sigh as she gets out of a car at the beginning of the movie. It’s almost as if she knew she had made a terrible choice and was gearing up to fire her agent after the director yelled “cut”.

Miranda Cosgrove Looks Out A Window, Scene 1/250
Miranda Cosgrove Looks Out A Window, Scene 1/250
In all honesty, The Intruders should’ve been titled Unsurprising Red Herrings because at least then it would’ve made sense. The film revolves around Miranda Cosgrove’s character – who from here on out shall be referred to as “Becky” because I cannot be bothered to remember her actual name – and her father moving into a house that her father intends to “flip”. He’s a serial house-flipper it seems, as evidenced by Becky’s constant and unrelenting teenage angst about the whole ordeal, thus cluing the audience in on the fact that the house isn’t the only thing in need of some work. Becky is apparently on medication and her father worries about her, but he is so busy with work! Oh, the conflict! Oh, the drama! The two are planning a day out together, a day they sorely need, when the father gets a phone call: “I’m sorry honey, IT LOOKS LIKE I HAVE TO GO INTO WORK TOMORROW INSTEAD,” he says with all the angst of a 40 year-old Becky. Anyway, Becky is on medication and dealing with a father who is so absent from her life that any mental setback is instantly disregarded. Becky decides to go off her medication and it is at this point that I said “Oh, so the rest of the movie is her hallucinating things, no one believes her, and it ends with her actually being right all along”. Yes, Past Me, you nailed it.
The Intruders is a movie about a SINGLE intruder living in Becky’s house. Nobody believes Becky when she reports things because it’s essential to keep the wafer-thin plot from crumbling under its own weight. All the while, we’re given misleading shots and audio cues to point to various people who might be the intruder. “Sorry again for the intrusion,” one such character says to Becky as he walks out of her basement and somehow restrains himself from winking directly at the camera. The only redeeming factor of this movie is at the end where the villain is taken to a hospital after Becky stabs him. Becky and her father move to a new house far, far away and when she looks out her window onto the street, she sees the villain. He disappears behind a bus moments later and we’re left wondering whether he is real or not. I guess I should only call this a partially redeeming factor because if she’s hallucinating, that’s stupid. We’ve already determined she wasn’t. But if he has really tracked her down, color me interested. The villain in this movie is absolutely crazy (not “Becky” crazy), so an unrelenting pursuit is actually engaging.
But please, please, please do not make a sequel based off of this one M&M in a bowl of candy cigarettes.

Last Updated on November 27, 2018.

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