You're Next - 3 stars

This is a pretty typical home invasion / slasher movie, with a few quirks.  The movie starts with a couple having sex.  They finish, he gets in the shower and she goes downstairs to get a drink and turn on the stereo.  The guy gets out of the shower and finds the girl dead.  He sees the words "You're next" written on the window, then he's quickly dispatched.

It seems like an awful waste of time for the killer to write "You're next" on the window, then kill the victim right away.  What's the point in that?

Anyway, we then meet the main characters of the story.  Paul and Aubrey Davison are celebrating their 35th anniversary, and they're having their kids over for dinner.  They have 3 sons and 1 daughter, and each brings their significant other.  Paul and Aubrey are rich and live in a nice mansion outside of town.  It's the kind of place where it takes 10 minutes to walk to the neighbor's house to borrow some milk.

The movie stops for about 15 minutes while we are introduced to the characters, and these are the most annoying, pretentious douches I've seen in a movie in a long time.  It felt very amateurish.  The movie was filmed hand held, and at times it was so shaky for no reason that I can't believe they didn't film another take.  The dialogue was bad and the acting wasn't much better.  I was really not enjoying this movie at all.

Then the killing started and somehow the movie got fun.  There were some jokes that I couldn't tell whether they were intentional or not, but they made me laugh anyway.  It turns out one of the dinner guests is an expert survivalist, and while the others are behaving like typically stupid horror movie victims, she was prepared to fight back. 

By the end of the movie, I was having a great time.  I think the filmmakers may have deliberately made the characters so unlikeable on purpose, so that we would enjoy seeing them die.  They also may have wanted us to think it was a horrible movie so that they could surprise us in the end.  I'm not sure.  But as far as slasher movies go, this is a pretty good one.