Maya (Madelaine Petsch) finally unmasks sack-headed serial killer Scarecrow (Gabriel Basso), presumably so she can use it do to her grocery shopping.

The Strangers – Chapter 3 (which Prime Video insists on calling STRANGERS, THE – CHAPTER 3) opens with a dictionary definition of the term ‘serial killer’, the dumbest use of that device since the Lindsay Lohan Netflix movie Irish Wish began by defining the word ‘wish’ (incidentally the fastest I have ever switched off a film).

We then flashback to the masked killers’ early years abducting and murdering guests at the motel where one of them works; hardly a sustainable business model, but then nothing in this trilogy is sustainable. It spends three films following the permanently bored-looking Maya as she’s chased by the murderers without ever providing any reason to care whether she survives, then tries to justify its existence by revealing the killers’ backstory – the problem being they don’t have one. Turns out they just like killing people, which was already pretty bleeding obvious.

It also demystifies anything frightening about them, turning sackhead from a blank slate where we could (in theory) project our own fears, into the most generic emo sad-boy cliché. The lack of imagination, pace or gore make this another tedious case of torture porn without the torture (or porn), padding out its zero story with painfully slow dialogue, psuedo-religious waffle and more plot holes than actual plot – from the sheriff (Richard Brake) trying to dispose of a body in broad daylight, to Scarecrow keeping his mask on when everyone knows his identity. Maybe he’s worried everyone will tell him to put it back on, a bit like what happened with KISS.

Chapter 3 delivered a franchise-low at the box office, and while there will be more Strangers movies to over-explain another insignificant detail and provide fodder for streaming services, this trilogy deserves to sink the series like a sack of spuds.