‘The Strangers’ – Don’t open that door!

Audiences will put up with a finite amount of stupidity in their horror movies.

It’s grand fun to yell at the TV screen – “don’t go into that room, you idiot!” But if the protagonist repeatedly puts himself in jeopardy, you start rooting for the guy with the machete.

That twisted logic holds true with “The Strangers,” an occasionally creepy horror film just released on DVD.

Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman play a couple returning home from a wedding. He just proposed to her, and she gently turned him down. Suffice to say the tension between them is palpable, and realistically somber.

Their issues get shoved aside when a group of masked strangers start knocking on their door — hard. What do they want? Why are they picking on them? And why don’t film characters ever charge their cell phones?

Better yet, why isn’t the movie over the minute Speedman’s character gets his mitts on a loaded shotgun?

First time writer/director Bryan Bertino has plenty to learn about creating a cohesive story and writing characters with IQs north of their body temperatures. But for a while he establishes a creepy tone thanks ro savvy orchestration of the film’s lighting, composition and background music.

He often overplays his hand.

It’s one thing to have characters who still use a record player, but to lean so heavily on a turntable to spark suspense seems like cheating.

“The Strangers” is full of such deceits. It’s soon crystal clear every plot decision flows from Bertino’s need to frighten us, not from any organic story structure.

By the film’s halfway point we can anticipate where every scare sequence will start – and end.

“The Strangers” is oh, so loosely based on a true story, but there’s nothing presented here than seems remotely rooted in reality.