It’s not a shock to anyone who knows me that going into The Strangers: Chapter 3 I believed Renny Harlin’s reboot of The Strangers was one more strike away from being, at least in my eyes, the worst horror trilogy of all time. But now that we’re finally here after what feels like an eternity of waiting, I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or throw the biggest party imaginable, because Harlin has done it again. It’s the perfect hat-trick, as Chapter 3 is every bit as bad as the previous entries, with perhaps the scariest thing about it being the nightmarish audacity to even tease another instalment.

The Strangers: Chapter 3 begins immediately after the previous film ends. Maya (Madelaine Petsch) has managed to kill one of the masked Strangers. Unfortunately for her, it happens to be the one with a romantic connection to the group’s leader, Scarecrow, who is now, if at all possible, even more hellbent on killing Maya. If it wasn’t already obvious, Maya realises her only way out is to kill the remaining Strangers. And that really is it in terms of plot, pretty much identical to Chapters 1 and 2.

And just like Chapter 2, this entry pads out its runtime with an abundance of flashbacks, fleshing out the Strangers’ backstories as the film limps forward. There is perhaps one mildly interesting moment that shows how the third Stranger became part of the group, but for all intents and purposes it feels more like an isolated incident than the deranged trauma suffered by the other two killers. Alas, the one idea here with any real potential is as underdeveloped as everything else across the trilogy.

This version of The Strangers still lacks the fundamentals that made the original film so fun and frightening in the first place. Instead, it leans into painfully telegraphed kills you can see coming a mile off and relies heavily on random loud noises to generate any kind of scare. Spoiler alert, it’s not even very successful at that. And if I sound like a broken record pointing out the complete lack of tension or fear, that’s entirely deliberate, because despite the widely publicised reshoots meant to fix Chapters 2 and 3, the series still can’t get the basics right.

I’ve tried to be fair to Madelaine Petsch in my previous reviews, placing more blame on the material than on her performance. After this, though, despite the script still being dreadful, it’s clearly a two-way street. Her line delivery is consistently poor, and when she’s asked to carry scenes with nothing but facial expressions, it’s completely unconvincing. At this point, the performance sadly matches the quality of the writing, at least in Chapter 3.

As ever, the character decisions will have you tearing your hair out, that is if you can muster enough energy to care about what’s happening at all. You could count on one hand the number of choices a normal, functioning human being might make. The film is also badly edited, jumping from scene to scene and from day to night in the blink of an eye, giving the whole thing a jarringly choppy feel. And the last-minute Hail Mary attempt to throw religion and Satan into the mix did at least earn a small chuckle, followed swiftly by a very loud sigh.

Morbid curiosity is all I have left for this trilogy. What would it look like if all three films were crushed into one? Would it be an improvement? Because it genuinely can’t get any worse. As the book closes on what I truly hope is the final chapter of this iteration of The Strangers, all I could think about was everything better I could have done with four and a half hours of my life. Instead, I chose to watch three laughably bad films, and that thought alone sent more shivers down my spine than anything on display in any of Renny Harlin’s The Strangers movies.