Make America Purge Again

For our Scream 101 episode about this film, click here.

Year: 2016

Director: James DeMonaco

Cast: Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell, Mykelti Williamson

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I dig the Purge movies. The first film I ever reviewed on this blog, The Purge is a decent home invasion pic working with a great sci-fi concept. The Purge: Anarchy expands that idea, trundling an ensemble cast through an L.A. gauntlet and furthering its political subtext. Now we have The Purge: Election Year, where the political subtext explodes into being more or less the actual plot. I dig over-the-top political horror movies and Anarchy was a major improvement on the original Purge, so I was cautiously excited for this one.

But here’s my problem. Purge writer-director James DeMonaco is like a different person each time he makes one of these films. On the first, he was a bright-eyed ingénue with big dreams. On the second, he was a John Carpenter aesthetician with the energy of a Tony Scott. On Election Year, he is a tactless boor who has heard that our country is experiencing political turmoil, but hasn’t read anything past the headlines.

And you KNOW you can find this guy in the comments section of any political Facebook post.

So, here’s the story. Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) is running for president on the Democratic anti-Purge platform. She wants to abolish the yearly holiday where all crime is legal for 12 hours. She lost her family to the Purge and argues that it’s merely an excuse to target the poor and homeless, reducing America’s need to take care of them. In a false gesture of goodwill, the Republicans New Founding Fathers lift the Purge’s ban on eliminating government officials. Of course, they can afford the greatest protection services in the world, so this is just an excuse to assassinate the Senator.

Mission Accomplished This attempt fails and Senator Roan goes on the run with her security advisor Leo (Frank Grillo, returning from Anarchy), who has devoted his life to protecting her and helping her fight the Purge after his experiences two years ago. They end up taming with deli owner Joe (Mykelti Williamson), his employee Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), and the vigilante EMT Laney (Betty Gabriel) to try and survive the Washington D.C. Purge.

They must run, hide, shoot, and dodge all the hamfisted political allegory.

The Purge: Election Year could have been a tremendously fun action-horror romp that wears its politics on its sleeve but doesn’t take itself too seriously. Unfortunately James DeMonaco thinks he’s making Schindler’s List and not a Blumhouse movie. He dives so deep into the mechanics of his pretend election (there’s multiple conversations about poll percentages and electoral colleges. In a  Purge movie!) that he can’t help but fail. The obvious hot button topics are all present (racism, classism, gun control, Ferguson-esque riots), but it’s hard to take an anti-gun stance seriously when we’re watching a teenage black girl get shot in the face. BY OUR HERO. And we’re supposed to cheer.

In the context of the film’s plot, it’s not quite as bad as I’ve made it sound, but DeMonaco clearly hasn’t stopped to fully work out what he’s saying in this picture. Film violence is all fine and dandy, but bloody action films are a haven for the conservative worldview. Grafting a radical liberal moral onto this type of movie is like trying to thread a needle with the Empire State Building. That requires a lot of finesse, and the man responsible for this does not possess it in spades.

Not to mention that the dialogue is grating at the best of times and ruthlessly tasteless at best. Poor Mykelti Williamson has to swallow the worst tripe, constantly shouting “My Negro!” and making fried chicken jokes that really leave a foul taste when you remember this was all penned by a white dude. Every ethnic character is a rough-shod stereotype and even the dialogue that isn’t expressly racist or homophobic (if I had a quarter for every time somebody says “c*cksucker” in this movie, I’d outgross Free State of Jones) is just clunky (“I’ll butter YOUR bagel!”), which is something I never had a problem with in the other movies.

A running theme of any Election Year review.

That’s not to say that Election Year is an unremittingly awful Purge movie (we grades these things on a curve, we do). With a clear antagonist, the film is given a chase structure that allows for a tighter narrative than Anarchy’s “Purge tram tour” vibe. And the moments where we just get to witness what various citizens are up to on Purge Night have a pleasing nightmare funhouse quality that will translate supremely well into Universal’s inevitable Halloween Horror Nights attraction. Plus, one scene (from a car decked out in Christmas lights comes pouring a gaggle of masked girls dressed like they’re out at a bachelorette party while Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.” blares) actually reaches the bombastic silly heights that I perhaps optimistically expected this movie to be chock full of.

Other than that, though, it’s just plain vulgar. In addition to what I’ve already mentioned, we get a nice xenophobic nod to Germany that recalls the heights of Nazism (what fun!) and some pointed remarks about Juarez from somebody who couldn’t locate it on a map. The depiction of the liberal candidate as a flawless bright angel of purity (which Mitchell manages to ground in some semblance of angry humanity even though she’s been given the thankless role of essentially a Christ figure) and the conservative ruling party as a horde of sallow, hook-nosed, rictus grinning fiends like a wax museum diorama of Lon Chaney’s career is kind of fun, but obliterates every last shred of nuance in this extraordinarily tawdry odyssey through a sea of malformed allegory and friendly fire against the very groups this film is attempting to defend.

I’m on the hook for one more Purge film, because I do think something truly great could be born from this concept. But if it’s anything like Election Year, I’m gonna have to call it quits on binging these movies.

TL;DR: The Purge: Election Year is a vulgar, tasteless film and the worst of the franchise.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1040
Reviews In This Series
The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013)
The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014)
The Purge: Election Year (DeMonaco, 2016)
The First Purge (McMurray, 2018)

Paris Je Lame

Year: 2014

Director: John Erick Dowdle

Cast: Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge

Run Time: 1 hour 33 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Warning: This article contains SPOILERS for the first half hour of As Above, So Below. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Found Footage. 

Found Footage is what brings us together today. It awoke in America with The Blair Witch Project, slumbered peacefully until the advent of the Paranormal Activity franchise, and reached its brightest dream with the Spanish cinematic sledgehammer that is [REC]. But instead of hibernating once more, awaiting its resurgence like the behemoth that is the 3D fad, found footage stayed quite active, festering at the fringes of mainstream society, setting in like a permanent rot on the eaves of Hollywood.

You see, unlike 3D, found footage costs almost nothing to make. There's no extra processing fees, no unwieldy cameras. It's no fiscal strain to crack open a prosumer camcorder from Target. Loving the fact that this cinéma vérité trend kept their wallets nice and limber, studios have been keeping the subgenre on life support, refusing to pull the plug.

In fact, this year already saw two found footage releases (Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones and Devil's Due) within two weeks of each other. Now, I'm a big fan of this filmmaking style - it's a delightful way to thrust oneself into a new world and the genre produced my favorite film of all time - and find something to love in even the most tawdry of shaky cam nasties (Save one - Zombie Diaries 2: World of the Dead, which you may never get a review of considering the fact that the only way I'll be able to sit through it again is if it's playing in my funeral home. And that's just because I won't have had enough time to teach my incorporeal ectoplasmic form how to change the channel.).

So I find no problem in the current FF boom, nor do I side with the common recent complaint that casting recognizable actors ruins the illusion (news flash - nobody actually believes these movies to be real anymore - that idea died with Heather Donahue in Blair Witch). But I do take issue with the outrageously mistaken concept that using the found footage gimmick can cloak egregious story flaws thanks to its artificial realism (and, more importantly, still make a metric buttload of return on investment).

You bet your sweet bippy I'm going somewhere with this.

As Above, So Below starts off well enough. In fact, it starts off fascinating. [LAST CALL FOR FIRST ACT SPOILERS] Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), an intrepid young scholar, wants to continue the lifelong quest of her recently deceased father - namely, finding the sorcerer's philosopher's stone, the fabled alchemic token that can grant eternal life. She ropes in her Aramaic-speaking friend George (Ben Feldman) to help her with translation and young filmmaker Benji (Edwin Hodge, the Stranger from The Purge) to create a documentary about her pursuit of the stone through the catacombs of Paris.

On their way, they gather three experienced Parisian cave-explorers, only one of whom, Papillon (François Civil), is particularly important because he is very handsome. So, things happen and they end up exploring a possibly cursed uncharted tunnel of the catacombs in their pursuit of the stone (and the treasure rumored to be buried with it). Some nasty things begin to happen, but the trailer has spoiled enough, so this is where we get off the plot train.

And onto the... analysis... bus? Captions are hard.

Aside from the dazzlingly out-of-left-field plot device provided by the presence of the philosopher's stone in the narrative, As Above, So Below also boasts a tremendously intriguing mixture of ancient cultures and religious iconography, as well as calling influence from such classic films as The Descent, Indiana Jones, Aladdin, National Treasure, and even Enchanted (more than once, if you can believe it).

This dense array of narrative elements sets out a keen and complex bed for the themes and plot to lay on. Unfortunately, after a night of hard drinking, they prefer to sleep on the floor. By the time the film crosses the 90 minute finish line, it has absolutely bungled almost each and every one of the elements that seemed so promising in the beginning, bogging down the insightful thematic material with needlessly generic jump scares and piercingly inane, resolutely muddled plot beats.

The fact that amid the piffling nonsense, the film gives the viewer anything to parse out and discuss afterwards is a triumph, but As Above, So Below could so easily have been a ten out of ten film that it's hard to come out of it tasting anything other than the bitter tang of defeat.

And the faint, but ineradicable aftertaste of Nicolas Cage.

I can't dig into the film too much because, again, spoilers, but there are enough wan plot devices in the first third to accurately exemplify the kind of execrable nonsense one is likely to encounter later on. First off, we're meant to believe that our sexy young leads have had the time and inclination to study an entire encyclopedia's worth of culture, science, and language, spreading across centuries. These kids do have masters degrees, but every time they go from zero to Copernicus in the blink of an eye, it reeks of movie magic, bringing one out of the movie far swifter than any vaguely recognizable genre actor could have.

And my doctor says I have to cut down on snark in my diet, so I'll limit myself to one more nitpick, but it's a big'un. A hastily translated Aramaic passage rhymes. In English. Something tells me that the ancient civilization that penned the inscription hadn't quite planned far enough ahead to anticipate the development of anglophone linguistics. Not unless Marty McFly had something to do with it. But then again, the lack of Chuck Berry lyrics would seem to rule that hypothesis out.

But this is a movie, not a doctoral thesis. Who cares about rhyme scheme? As Above, So Below is efficiently scary, disorienting, claustrophobic, and effective, justifying its documentary aspects with relative ease. So that alone makes it one of the better found footage efforts of the decade. It utilizes its budgetary limitations to tremendous effect especially in terms of set design, it creates tension within the audience even when it doesn't deserve it, and it tells a story that falls flat, but at least it takes the leap in the first place.

So what if the premise doesn't pan out one hundred percent? So what if the third act feels more like a Da Vinci Code-themed Universal Horror Nights maze? It provokes a feeling in the audience and conceptually, there's nothing else quite like it. It'll never be an enduring classic, but as a stepping stone toward a sleeker, better genre, As Above, So Below is essential viewing.

TL;DR: As Above, So Below is a waste of a brilliant premise, but in terms of scares remains a rather strong genre picture.

Rating: 7/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Skip it in theaters. This is definitely a RedBox movie. Save it for a rainy day. Lower your expectations, drop a blanket on your bod, and have a good time.

Word Count: 1210

Oh Mandy

Year: Who even knows?

Director: Jonathan Levine

Cast: Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Whitney Able

Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

A quick caveat: Because this is a slasher movie, I'm going to stomp all over spoilers here. With these films it's not really what happens but how it happens that matters. If you care about spoilers, just check out the TL;DR and come back later.

Let's discuss that whole "year" thing, shall we? All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is a slasher flick produced in 2006 that then proceeded immediately nowhere. Over years and years this film struggled to get on its feet until it finally managed to get a limited release seven years later on September 6, 2013.

Over the years, the hype has built and built because there's nothing the horror community loves more than a Little Slasher That Could. I myself have been following its progress for some months now, unfortunately missing it in theaters (C'mon, a one week release in the middle of a challenging semester? Give me a chance!) and falling into a deep depression when RedBox promised me it was in stock then proceeded to claim it never existed.

So was it all worth it?

Not at all, really. But it was OK. 

Kind of like this guy's torso.

In the grand tradition of slasher films everywhere, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane begins nine months before the main action during a terrible accident. Douchey jock Dylan (Adam Powell) is having a pool party and invites Mandy Lane (Amber Heard), a goody goody who, over the summer, has been bestowed a gift from the Puberty Fairy. 

She drags along her dorky friend Emmet (Michael Welch aka Bella's annoying friend Mike from Twilight, which is oddly prescient considering Heard's overwhelming resemblance to Kristen Stewart) who then talks Dylan into jumping into the pool from his roof to try and impress her.

It does not go well.

And it would be hard to tell if she's impressed anyway considering that she gives off about as much emotion as that chimney.

Nine months later, she is invited to a weekend ranch party (those are wild, I hear) in the middle of nowhere by some of her Meat. I mean friends.

There's Red (Aaron Himmelstein), the stoner whose family owns the ranch and is in love with Mandy Lane; Bird (Edwin Hodge, whose best known role is as the Bloody Stranger in The Purge), the obligatory black friend who is in love with Mandy Lane; his best friend Jake (Luke Grimes) who looks oddly like Harry Styles and is in love with Mandy Lane; and Garth (Anson Mount), the hot older ranch hand who against all odds is in love with Mandy Lane.

There's also Chloe (Whitney Able), the requisite coked out blonde bitch whose primary means of travel seems to be tripping; Marlin (Melissa Price), the slutty brunette who flashes her boobs at random gas station workers. And of course, Mandy Lane. Who is certainly pretty, but that doesn't make up for her deficit of any discernible human characteristics. She is a virgin. She doesn't do drugs. She has boobs.

That's about it. And she runs in slow motion a lot. Basically the film is entirely comprised of shots of Mandy Lane Baywatching around the ranch interspersed with violent deaths from time to time.

According to the filmmakers, running is an adequate substitute for personality.

So it turns out that Mandy Lane's old dorky friend Emmet is orchestrating the murders (this isn't even a spoiler because they show his face more or less immediately - an uncommon move in a slasher like this) decked out with a beanie and a shotgun.

The plot pukes along in a seemingly random and inconsistent manner, almost as if the writers were just flipping through a dictionary and incorporating whatever word they landed on into the script. The lights go out because one of the boys pulled out the fuse as a prank (even though he was clearly in the room during the outage and couldn't have done so). They send Bird to the emergency generator which is just chillin' under a tree in a field. Two teens stop their escape attempt to make out in front of the car they should be using to get the hell out of there. There's hella lesbian tension that goes nowhere. And my personal favorite exchange, when Garth laments Mandy Lane's beauty and complains that she's too young for him.

Garth: "If only you had a sister ten years older..." 

Mandy Lane: "I have a cousin! She's 21."

I know that can't possibly be what she meant but I like to imagine that Mandy Lane is actually 11 years old this whole time.

I mean, that's what I looked like when I was 11.

So there is some fun to be had in the inept corners of the plot (including a truly hilarious scene where a kid in a lake has a gun pointed at him and immediately ducks underwater like an ostrich in the sand), but at some point it all gets tangled up in the big "Why?"

It is revealed that Mandy Lane and Emmet are working together on this when she stabs Chloe. For some reason, they both have apparently committed to offing themselves right after their murder spree, but all of a sudden she changes her mind and turns on Emmet. The film tries to force her into the part of a quippy Final Girl but it just doesn't mesh considering that not two minutes ago she was knifing her friend in cold blood.

And there's loads of plot holes and loose ends, the most damning of which is "Why these people?" There is no motive for the mass murder or the suicide or Mandy Lane's eventual betrayal. The film as advertised could have been a cool story about a jealous young man offing potential romantic rivals but somewhere along the line it unraveled into the moth-ridden musty sweater of a film you see before you.

Boys will be boys, I guess.

It's actually a pretty great slasher throwback in the sense that it's not really very good at all.

The substandard production values remind me of some of the trashier Census Bloodbath entertainments in a genuinely grubby way that I haven't seen this side of Y2K. The video is all a little overexposed and washed out and the audio is about as clear as listening to music playing in somebody else's headphones from across the room.

In fact, for about half the movie I couldn't even tell what names they were calling each other and thought we were watching a film about Garp, Fred, Burt, and Marley. They didn't even half enough money for pretty boys, which is shocking but refreshing for a film from 2006. So it's all very genuinely, almost heartwarmingly bad (which is a quality I greatly admire in this sick world of intentionally bad fare) and the gore is pretty neat when it shows up.

But the most noteworthy thing about the film is Amber Heard's performance. A full two years before Twilight, she had the whole "hair twist, bite lip, blank stare" thing down pat. I swear it's like watching Bella Swan in a slasher film. Which also begs the question: We all know KStew's performance as Bella is not so great - but could it also be a rip-off?

Can a just world exist that contains two Bella Swans?

Perhaps we are better off not knowing. 

Killer: Emmet (Michael Welch)

Final Girl: Mandy Lane (Amber Heard)

Best Kill: Marlin gets a shotgun shoved in her mouth. But instead of pulling the trigger, he shoves it in deeper, crushing her windpipe and severing her jaw. Totally unexpected and cool gore.

Sign of the Times: An American Idol reference; A girl gets excited about her new belly button ring; somebody's emoticons look like this: :).

Scariest Moment: The LAKE SNAKE.

Weirdest Moment: Marlin gives Jake a handjob under a map in the backseat of a car during a conversation with their friends.

Champion Dialogue: "I admire you so. Will you protect us from the bandits?"

Body Count: 8

1. Dylan hits his head on the edge of the pool.
2. Jake is shot with a shotgun.
3. Marlin's jaw is broken with a shotgun.
4. Bird is stabbed to death.
5. Garth is shot with a shotgun.
6. Red is shot to death.
7. Chloe is stabbed in the stomach.
8. Emmet is shot and decapitated. 

TL;DR: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane is a genuinely bad slasher film, but that's what makes it fun.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1437