America First

Year: 2018

Director: Gerard McMurray

Cast: Y'lan Noel, Lex Scott Davis, Joivan Wade

Run Time: 1 hour 37 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Purge franchise and I have a very special, very troubled relationship. The original Purge was the first film I ever reviewed on this blog, so its rise is inextricably linked with mine. And you know I love me some political subtext in my horror movies. But as the franchise go on the subtext becomes text and that text becomes ridiculous. So I equally look forward to and dread each upcoming entry for the new heights of shameless browbeating, exciting inclusivity, and further demolition of the very concept of subtlety. It's a delicious combination of love and disappointment that keeps me coming back.

... Get it?

The First Purge tells the story of, well, the first Purge: the experiment that began the yearly 12 hour holiday of punishment-free crime and catharsis that has come to define America in the near-future. Spearheaded by apolitical psychologist Dr. Updale (Marisa Tomei, who is in the movie so little that I think she legally qualifies as an extra) and the deliciously villain-named Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh), the Chief of Staff for the New Founding Fathers who have recently taken office in the White House.

The first Purge will take place on Staten Island, with the residents enticed to stay with a financial incentive. Certain, more unstable individuals like the crackhead known as Skeletor (Rotimi Paul) are also granted additional money for each person they kill during the experiment. Let's just say the experiment is getting goosed a bit so it goes well for the White House, who want to eliminate the lower classes as efficiently as possible.

The lower classes we're concerned with in particular are brother and sister Nya (Lex Scott Davis) and Isaiah (Joivan Wade), their neighbors in a prominent housing project, and the drug kingpin Dimitri (Y'lan Noel, who you may know from being super hot, but also from Insecure on HBO) who used to date Nya before she turned to a straight and narrow life of poverty and activism.

Although any decision that leads you away from the most ripped man in Staten Island is probably a bad one.

This movie could have walked right into that "The Worst Purge" joke, and luckily it avoids that pitfall, but it doesn't rise far above "adequate" at any given moment. There are certain traditions that the Purge movies have become very good at that it continues, for certain, but it also doubles down on some of the worst habits of the franchise. But let's start with the good, I say.

For one thing, these movies always bring fresh new non-white-people talent to the board. Although this film doesn't have a particular standout like Election Year's Betty Gabriel, instead the entire cast provides a solid example of badass women and non-stereotyped men. By positioning ethnic minorities and lower class individuals as the protagonists, as they have in the last two or three entries (of course the original film had to follow a wealthy white family, this is the horror genre), they always bring a solid crop of young actors-to-watch, giving them a chance to finally grab the spotlight by being leads instead of being eleventh billed in Tyler Perry movies.

I commend this decision making, as always, though The First Purge seems unaware of the exact implications of positioning a drug kingpin as the hero of the story. He is just as culpable of killing minorities and terrorizing poor neighborhoods, but we're supposed to trust that the people he kills are the right ones, at least by the end. They toss a couple lines in the direction of that particular wrinkle, but mostly they don't seem to be aware of some of the deeper meanings they're creating.

Look, I know his guns are distracting, but you need to focus on the GUN sometimes.

The other good thing that keeps this film consistent with the franchise's milieu is the pretty unimpeachable visual and audio design. There is one particular sci-fi design choice I don't like (certain participants of the experiment are using video-recording contact lenses that give them goofy glowing eyes), but the masks they showcase here are - as ever - creatively creepy to the millionth degree, and the sound design that ignites the beginning of the Purge is still a chillingly grating bit of sonic shrapnel that sinks deep into your bones.

You may have noticed that I keep undercutting my compliments, but that's the rub of The First Purge. It is aggressively devoted to averaging out, sanding off the edges of anything worth watching. To be fair (or not, let's point some fingers), lots of material seems to have landed on the cutting room floor. There are a half dozen subplots and characters that practically never appear again or completely fail to have a showcase moment (especially in the case of a trio of old men who are clearly set up to be the Mykelti Williamson of this movie, but completely vanish before they get a chance to). It's a messy plot at best, a disastrously compromised one at worst.

And at the very worst, you have Marisa Tomei, who isn't technically slumming it because I don't think she's actually in this movie. We get to see her walk a little, stand a lot, and mumble a couple words before she's unceremoniously shoved from the movie. This is not how you treat your only established cast member, folks! I'm sure they could only get her for a couple days, but give her something to do for one of them!

Other than rock awesome wardrobe pieces from The Craft.

The thing about genre movies is that its strengths and flaws all rely on the bedrock of action or terror to support them, and The First Purge doesn't have much of either. The third act conflict is set within an obnoxious strobe light gag that I disliked for more reasons than my photosensitivity, and most of the Purge Night shenanigans don't really match the mania and almost beautiful phantasmagoria of previous entries. It's just enough to keep you invested in the basics of the plot and characters, but that's all you ever get. 

It's not the worst Purge by a long shot, but it's the blandest Purge, and that's almost worse because these movies are nothing if not zesty.

TL;DR: The First Purge is a bland, overserious action-horror flick, but it also continues some of the best traditions of the Purge franchise.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1092
Reviews In This Series
The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013)
The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014)
The Purge: Election Year (DeMonaco, 2016)
The First Purge (McMurray, 2018)

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)

Purge, Actually

Year: 2014

Director: James DeMonaco

Cast: Frank Grillo, Carmen Ejogo, Zach Gilford

Run Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

The Purge is a special franchise for Popcorn Culture. The hyper-political hypo-budget Blumhouse production was the first movie ever reviewed on the pages of this here blog and this rushed-into-production sequel marks it as the first franchise to ever be covered here in totum as it is released. I am looking forward to continuing on for many more years to follow other blossoming horror franchises as they appear (Oculus, I'm looking at you). 

This is a special moment for me personally, considering my love for bloated franchise fare. Nothing pleases me more than desperate horror series - the backflips and contortions of plot that they commit for the sake of continuity never cease to delight me. But I've missed out on all the notable examples. Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th were unfortunately produced before I existed. And I got into Saw and Paranormal Activity too late to follow them from the beginning.

So we have The Purge, a franchise with the potential to be either very promising or very disheartening and I don't know which to be more excited for. But for the moment we are facing The Purge: Anarchy, a sequel that is by no means perfect, but improves upon the original film in every single way, and that's literally all we can ask of it.

That and ham-fisted political allegory.

The beauty of The Purge as a franchise is that there are an almost limitless number of genres that can be explored while remaining utterly faithful to the central conceit. Where the first was a clunky home invasion pic, Anarchy is tense survival horror. The concept is so elastic, future installments could be slashers, mafia yarns, torture porn, rape-revenge, anthology, action-adventure, or even bullet-peppered romance. It's brilliant, really, and whatever qualms one may have with the Purge concept itself, it's undeniably capable of producing years' worth of popcorn horror cinema.

I mean, that's all it really is when it comes down to it. The politics are brave and the world-building is capable, but the Purge franchise is first and foremost a fuel-soaked summer blockbuster, tense quasi-horror with a sense of action movie fun about it.

The story immediately announces its scope (the first film had a massive opening weekend but dropped hard like a Skrillex song thanks to terrible word of mouth regarding its lack of interest in the concept) with three distinct storylines that will eventually intertwine. 

The first, and most consistent, is the story of Eva Sanchez (Carmen Ejogo) and her daughter Cali (Zoë Soul), two women struggling to make a life in LA. When their apartment complex in the projects is attacked during Purge Night (which I guess I haven't totally covered in this synopsis - this is a twelve hour period every year where all crime, including murder, is legal - this supposedly cuts crime rates during the rest of the year and is treated as a a national holiday by the New Founding Fathers), they become the targets for a mysteriously dedicated group of killers.

Also in attendance is the unnamed (or so I think - the IMDb synopsis would disagree with me, but I'm not about to start anything with mep1019. He comments on more slasher message boards than I do) Sergeant (Frank Grillo, who is an inspiration to us all at a very hunky 51 years old), a dark and mysterious man who is armed to the teeth with both weaponry and a woefully obvious backstory that narcissistically positions itself as a late film reveal.

The third storyline is that of Shane (Zach Gilford of Devil's Due) and Liz (Kiele Sanchez, his real life wife), a married couple going through a separation who are caught outside during the Purge due to circumstances outside of their control. The people who are in control, though, are patiently hunting them across the streets of LA.

With a face like that, I'D chase him all around LA too. (This is not a screenshot from the film, though I dearly wish it was.)

So these three disparate groups end up coming together for what is essentially a feature length tour of the world of the Purge. It's riddled with flaws, there's no doubt about that, but the picture it paints is a wonderful extension of the one only briefly glimpsed in the original film. The most important element of this franchise is the world-building and the Purge itself is tremendously well-integrated into the production design and dialogue. There is never any doubt that this is a world that has lived with the Purge for years and a country of people who may have different reactions to it, but accept its presence as an annual occurrence.

Where it begins to go wrong is at the story level and especially the performance level. The main group is largely adequate and Grillo and Ejogo provide a solid core for the film (we do lose Grillo a bit toward the end - he's much better as a mysterious badass than the shift he experiences in the third act), but many of the secondary characters just plain aren't up to snuff. Especially egregious is Michael K. Williams as Carmelo, the leader of a resistance faction. He is saddled with the worst of the "let's explain the film's politics in terms that a third grade mollusk could understand" dialogue and as such never comes off as anything more than a dollar store Samuel L. Jackson knock-off.

The dialogue claims many victims throughout the film, perhaps more so than the Purge itself. Thanks to the intricacies of the concept, it never needs to rise above the level of adequate to still be a thrilling movie, but some of the more pernicious examples bore straight into your brain and shatter the "suspension of disbelief" lobe. I won't belabor my point and list these examples, especially because many of them are at least bad-good enough to get a good laugh. But this is a film where people emerge from a car for the sole purpose of demanding a car from somebody else, so you know there's gonna be some issues here.

Sexy issues.

One last grievance is the special effects, which generally settle in as the film gets going, but occasionally look like somebody forgot to render them. An early gunshot wound in particular would feel more at home in an arcade game from 1997. But presumably much of the SFX budget got suctioned off into the multitude of sets and actors and empty cityscapes that The Purge: Anarchy requires and I can't bring myself to complain about that being the priority,

Because it really does its job well of allowing the film to be a rough, tense ride through a city of violence with a harrowing sense of urgency. Widening the scope truly was the answer to improving The Purge and with that done, it can (hopefully) open the floodgates to some legitimately marvelous filmmaking later in the franchise (If The Purge 3 isn't announced within the next week, I will eat my foot).

And it's not like this film isn't already an improvement at the technical level. Although Anarchy and the first film were both directed by James DeMonaco, he really gets into a groove this time. Where the last film's editing and sense of geography was wildly chimerical, here we always have a sense of who is where and why we should be worried about them. The action finale could have been staged better, but for the most part the locations make sense and provide an exciting 100 minutes of adrenaline-fueled entertainment.

Taken by itself, this film probably won't be remembered as a classic of the form over a decade from now, but it's a sequel that did its job - pushing and prodding the original story into something more expansive and vastly improved.

TL;DR: The Purge: Anarchy is a great sequel that surpasses the original film with an expanded scope and more excitement.

Rating: 8/10
Should I Spend Money On This? I'd say yes. It definitely beats the other big blockbuster this weekend. I'd pick a tense LA action film over watching Cameron Diaz's mummy seduce Jason Segel any day.
Word Count: 1379
Reviews In This Series
The Purge (DeMonaco, 2013)
The Purge: Anarchy (DeMonaco, 2014)
The Purge: Election Year (DeMonaco, 2016)
The First Purge (McMurray, 2018)

I've Seen the Future, and It Is Low Budget

Year: 2013

Director: James DeMonaco

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Lena Headey, Max Burkholder

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

These home invasion movies are getting pretty big now, or so it would seem. A preview before The Purge for the upcoming film You're Next features a mind-numbingly similar plot line, and both films clearly raided the costume closet of The Strangers. 

Oh well. It's better than torture porn.

But I digress. Despite what it, let's say, borrows from its predecessors, The Purge has a leg to stand on with a solid and clever premise. It is the year 2022 and crime is at an all time low. The economy is booming and the quality of life is as never before, all because one night a year all crime is legal. Ordinary people can murder, rape, and pillage to their hearts' content ostensibly for the purpose of getting pent up aggression and violence out of their systems.

Our protagonists for the evening are the Sandin family - a wealthy clan living in a gated community. The father, James (Ethan Hawke), is a successful businessman who sells state-of-the-art security systems for use during the Purge. His wife Mary (Lena Headey, who I'm told is a Game of Throne) is a woman who womans. Their teenage daughter Zoey (Adelaide Kane) rebels against the strict rules laid down by her father, spurred on by her Statutory Rapey boyfriend, Henry (Tony Oller). The younger son Charlie (Max Burkholder) has invented a little remote-controlled robot that is equipped with night vision and silent wheels and has a secret hiding place behind a loose panel in his closet. You can practically hear Chekhov's gun getting cocked for the third act.

At 7 PM, the Purge begins and the family cozies up behind their thick steel barricades, safe in the knowledge that they will live to see another - oh, wait. Charlie let in a homeless man who is being pursued by a cadre of masked strangers.

Oh, that Charlie. What a goof.

The strangers, led by a charismatic and totally bonkers young man (Rhys Wakefield), have picked this man as their target for this year's Purge and will stop at nothing to see him dead. They threaten to murder the entire family if they don't turn the man over to them. The Sandins take issue with this, and prepare themselves for the longest night of their lives.

What a pickle!

The Purge is one of those magical movies through which I can convince my boyfriend I'm psychic by accurately predicting every story beat about 20 minutes before it happens, though that isn't necessarily a bad thing. There is some comfort in familiarity, after all, and The Purge delivers a mostly solidly constructed home invasion thriller that is engaging and (perhaps most importantly) brief.

By sticking with an 85 minute run time, credits included, The Purge ends before it can squander the underdog goodwill earned through its absurdly low $3 million budget. There are a few key movie sins that, had we been forced to spend more time with them, would have overwhelmed the production. For the sake of simplicity, I will divide these flaws into three categories.

First, The Purge is a less than flawless morality play about class division and right to life that frequently bludgeons the audience with its opinion. Obviously, the filmmakers had Something Very Important to say, and wanted to make sure nobody missed it.

This is not an unfounded concern. A good portion of the film is devoted to news coverage of the Purge showing people being mercilessly beaten and killed in every corner of the country. In a very Hunger Games-esque touch, this footage is compiled for the wealthy families to enjoy from the safety of their own homes. The point being that society at large is so desensitized to violence that real world atrocities have become nighttime entertainment. That this message occurs in a film in which the primary draw is the violence inflicted upon unwilling participants is not addressed. 

Most of the violence in the film is inflicted upon faceless, mask-wearing criminals or villains so cartoonishly evil that they are in fact stripped of all humanity. However, this doesn't change the fact that  this is exactly what the filmmakers are condemning, and that cognitive dissonance lingers throughout the film.

Yup, there's still humans under there. Isn't it weird how masks work?

Second, the editing is kind of a mess. The entire film takes place in a sprawling mansion but we the audience get very little sense of the geography of the house and where rooms are in relation to one another. Thus intercutting a scene of somebody about to get murdered in one room and somebody running to save them from another room has no real impact because we have no clue how close together those rooms actually are.

In addition, there is a lengthy stalking scene straight out of an 80's slasher movie in which Mary crosses three rooms pursued by a shadowy figure that, if the cross-cutting is to be believed, actually took place over a good half hour of filmic time. 

And do you know that scene in the end of every action movie where the hero is about to get stabbed/shot/freeze rayed but the villain screams and falls, revealing the sidekick holding a gun who miraculously saves the day? Do you like that scene? Good. It happens approximately 29 times.

Finally, the characters act like the worst of the worst Stupid Horror Movie Characters. They bumble all over the place slamming doors and turning lights on when they're trying to hide and getting jump scared around every corner. The first ten minutes even feature the hackneyed "something is hiding behind the refrigerator door!" scare.

Under the bed. Unique. Good work.

These scenes can be found in any commonplace horror movies from any decade basically since films have existed, and are the biggest detriment to the film. For The Purge is not at all a good horror movie. I would go so far as to suggest that it isn't even horror at all. Oh, it tries to be. But what the filmmakers ignore is that they actually have a pretty good action thriller on their hands.

All in all, despite its flaws, The Purge is a serviceable thriller that, while predictable, is built on a fresh premise and is accommodating in giving us what we want to see in terms of a butt-kicking good time (if you ignore all that high and mighty moral stuff). It also features some truly impressive world building. The Purge creates and inhabits its own universe, and not once did I doubt that this was a world in which the Purge has been happening for years.

In fact, one of my favorite details of the film was in the beginning. As the neighbors were preparing for that night's Purge, instead of saying "Good night" or "See you tomorrow," they said "Have a safe night." The manner in which it was said indicated that it was a commonplace saying, one that has long since gained acceptance in the lexicon of their world and that nobody really pays attention to. It's just a part of that pre-programmed script of small talk and daily pleasantries, tucked snugly between "Nice weather today" and "How's your kids?"

The Purge works best when it gets to play with the world it has created and luckily it doesn't disappoint. And even though it has some big problems, it is a genuine film and you can feel the personality of the filmmakers behind every frame, which is worth a couple extra points in my book.

TL;DR: The Purge isn't what it wants to be, but the thing it is isn't too shabby in and of itself.

Rating: 6/10

Should I spend money on this? Yes, because it really is an impressive movie for its miniscule budget.

Word Count: 1323

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