Post by Dracula on Jul 8, 2021 8:24:01 GMT -5
The Forever Purge(7/5/2021)
The Purge franchise might be unique among horror series in that it actually gets a lot more ambitious and political as it goes. The first movie basically sucked but over the course of its five movie run it has expanded and become increasingly bold in its provocations… but that’s not to say any of these movies are actually great because they aren’t. The basic premise at the center of all of them remains absolutely ridiculous and implausible and none of them are really as smart or as effective as they think they are, but they are consistently doing things with genre that I at least find interesting. The last movie, The First Purge, was rather overly attempting to be the “Black Lives Matter” tinged Purge movie for better or worse and this latest installment, The Forever Purge, is set on the Mexican border and looks at Trump era xenophobia (it was supposed to come out before the election but got delayed by the pandemic). In this one the actual night of “The Purge” (a “holiday” in the dystopian future of the series’ world in which all laws are suspended for a night so people can get out their murderous urges) only takes up about fifteen minutes of screen time and the rest of the movie depict the day after when (in an act of coordination and secrecy that is wildly unbelievable) a group of disaffected purgers decide to continue the purge past its legal boundaries into what is essentially a right wing populist revolution of ethnic cleansing where rich snobs and immigrants are the first ones against the wall. With this movie the series has basically stopped being anything resembling a pure horror work and becomes more of a low budget action movie but also one that’s very interested in western iconography and the resulting movie is an interesting mashup of genres. It is not, however, a movie with terribly interesting characters to empathize with and its individual sequences never rise too far above the level of average. Still, I’m fascinated by just how openly mainstream horror movies have been allowed to become and admire just how boldly Blumhouse has been willing to expand on this wacky concept in order to make these movies fit the times.
*** out of Five
The Purge franchise might be unique among horror series in that it actually gets a lot more ambitious and political as it goes. The first movie basically sucked but over the course of its five movie run it has expanded and become increasingly bold in its provocations… but that’s not to say any of these movies are actually great because they aren’t. The basic premise at the center of all of them remains absolutely ridiculous and implausible and none of them are really as smart or as effective as they think they are, but they are consistently doing things with genre that I at least find interesting. The last movie, The First Purge, was rather overly attempting to be the “Black Lives Matter” tinged Purge movie for better or worse and this latest installment, The Forever Purge, is set on the Mexican border and looks at Trump era xenophobia (it was supposed to come out before the election but got delayed by the pandemic). In this one the actual night of “The Purge” (a “holiday” in the dystopian future of the series’ world in which all laws are suspended for a night so people can get out their murderous urges) only takes up about fifteen minutes of screen time and the rest of the movie depict the day after when (in an act of coordination and secrecy that is wildly unbelievable) a group of disaffected purgers decide to continue the purge past its legal boundaries into what is essentially a right wing populist revolution of ethnic cleansing where rich snobs and immigrants are the first ones against the wall. With this movie the series has basically stopped being anything resembling a pure horror work and becomes more of a low budget action movie but also one that’s very interested in western iconography and the resulting movie is an interesting mashup of genres. It is not, however, a movie with terribly interesting characters to empathize with and its individual sequences never rise too far above the level of average. Still, I’m fascinated by just how openly mainstream horror movies have been allowed to become and admire just how boldly Blumhouse has been willing to expand on this wacky concept in order to make these movies fit the times.
*** out of Five
