Mainstream movies have become mash-ups now, the big budgets making an original thought too risky to have except in the abstract. So THE PURGE is HUNGER GAMES meets FUNNY GAMES divided by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT + HOSTEL, imagining a grim dystopian future that uses a mischief night-style no rules (no cops) bloody free-for-all as an excuse for wiping out the homeless, bringing population levels under control and boosting sales of home security systems. The annual Purge is a chance for all people to settle old grudges and/or kill for sport, reflecting a grim nihilistic world view that presumes all humans are really homicidal sadists at heart, and only the rich get to sit it out behind steel shutters. So far s good, but like so many good ideas before, the premise is all that's refreshing --it just boils down to a rich white yuppie family with a poor sweaty black man duct taped to a chair as their family conversation boils down to bleeding heart idiot liberal kid lifting up the iron shutters (what idiot dad would even give him the password?), letting that sweat-glazed black man into their house to hide from a gaggle of masked preppie kids for whom the Purge is a chance for EYES WIDE SHUT-style maskies and lashings of the old ultra-violent. This explains why this black dude was in their tony neighborhood but rather than just ride off in search of other prey the masked kids lay siege to the house, wasting hours wandering around outside like a mix of Whit Stillman preppies, the British drunks in STRAW DOGS. And finally you're like oh brother, can't we FF to the final bloodletting? (We did).
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In other words, despite a novel premise it all boils down to bleeding heart liberal arts majors reciting their theses to one another, the kind of stereotypically WASP bourgeois family that drinks red wine in fancy yuppie stemware for dinner, and the wife is a hot, willowy thing (Leana Headey) in perfectly-fitting white slacks, and there's always Ethan Hawke, desperate in his fashion to escape the gravitas-snatching banshees of his past indiscretion against Uma Thurman. And an interesting idea like this "Purge" - clearly well thought out in the beginning, right down to the nice touch of people putting blue flowers on their porches, the wise use of 'tick-tock momentum,' and shots of masked figures standing silently in the dark backgrounds stolen deftly from THE STRANGERS (without actually picking up on what made them work), are frittered away on Civics 101 Voight-Kampf empathy tests. In the similar and better FEAR, of course the house had steel shutters for no discernible reason (storms, I think, were cited) and that movie was ten times better for the presence of Mark Wahlberg (below, top) playing up the animus core of it all, rather than playing up the Marx 101. FEAR knew how to appeal to a girl audience one way and a boy audience the other, and never the two to cross except for bloodlust feuerwerken!
It would have been lots better if, for example, one of the liberal family members had been all keen to do some killing of their own. We never even get a sense of any of them being at all bloodlust-ish even while killing in self defense. Instead the only character I found myself respecting was this kid above, played with eerie grace by a dude name of the above pictured Rhys Wakefield (he's Australian, no surprise considering his Heath Ledger-ish psycho flair). It all comes tumbling together in one of those besieged home invasion things that someone like Peckinpah, Hawks, or Carpenter could make sing. Ethan Hawke and writer-director James DeMonaco are probably trying to make an EL DORADO to go with their RIO BRAVO - ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake. Dude, you ain't never gonna touch the Carpenter, which means no Hawks neither! That 1978 original film was made on no money but oh, that awesome electronic score. Dududadah DUHdududadah Dududdadah DaDududaha.
THE PURGE is made on no money, too - made for three million it's earned 64 so far, and a sequel is naturally in the works. The only reason I even rented it was I'd gotten it mixed up with YOU'RE NEXT, but I didn't even like it when it was called THE STRANGERS, on which both films are roughly based (see "A Couple of Bagheads") and that's why you never let a stranger in your house, without first looking it up on imdb.
Then there's the thing with the new THOR movie, THE DARK WORLD (2013). I was excited to see Natalie Portman again as she and Chris Hemsworth had great chemistry in the first film, but now both seem coated in a CGI airbrushed patina and a veil of hangover, as if all the special Fx swamped their fire, leaving it up to Kat Dennings to supply all the human interest and witty patter. She steals all her scenes and thank god because otherwise this THOR would be as cold and inhuman as a RESIDENT EVIL joint. The other saving grace is the complex currents of fraternal bonding and jealousy between trickster archetype Loki (Tom Hiddleston, who brings a dash of Sex Pistol snarl to his impeccably droll sarcasm) and Thor. Matching Loki's sulky snark with love, fraternal affection, and outright bullying, Hemsworth wakes up in their shared scenes and so does the movie.
Alas, Dennings and Hiddleston aren't around nearly enough, there's way too many other Snapple bottles in the air. Acting in all that blue screen must be like wading through a swamp to try and get at any real characterization. In the first film (it made my top ten!), director Kenneth Branagh kept the Shakespeare underpinnings alive and resonant below the CGI, but Alan Taylor-James Gunn bury it deep. I may have felt this way because I was seeing it in a Harrisburg multiplex over the break, my girl next to me sighing in disgust every time a cliche passed the screen, and the theater too hot for comfort, and it started after being beaten to death with sublimated US Army recruitment ads buried in the onslaught of action previews, including Branagh's new directorial job, JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT.
I'll confess I've been a big fan of these Marvel films overall: they reward multiple viewings and never take themselves too seriously, unlike, say, Batman and Superman over at DC. Marvel scripts are often things of beauty, boiling vast prequels of exposition down to a few smatterings of hipster dialogue and the heroes have flaws like narcissism, drinking, insecurity, anger issues. That said, THOR: THE DARK WORLD lapses at times into DC self-importance and oh man are those bad guys, the s -- familiar. Not only do they look like tie-fighters and storm troopers with masks that make them look like Elvin Orc Klingon Mordor Palpatine Voldemorts, they drive zippy tie-fighters and wear masks that make them seem straight of some J-Horror like ONE MISSED CALL. Asgard meanwhile looks so much like Mongo in the 1980 FLASH GORDON that when it's zippy force field goes up you think damn, shit must be intentional. These "Dark Elves" only have one saving grace, their total devotion to wiping out all life in all seven dimensions, reminding me a lot of me when I'm super cranky and hung over and trying to take a nap while kids scream outside my window and trucks back up beep beep beep beep and car alarms go off all up and down 7th Avenue for no reason.
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| From top: Emerald City, Asgard, Mongo |
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| Another Green World: from top: Prometheus, Dark World, Potter, Absentia |
There are a certain type of person who sees a ghost and thinks they saw a ghost and there's a type of person who, like me, sees a ghost and figures he's hallucinating. I might have seen a dozen real ghosts by now and just cited flashbacks and/or a bad flu or lack of sleep or too much of it, and this girl's therapist has her believing she's just stressed so seeing her missing husband everywhere. Maybe he is. Maybe there's some interdimensional portal that troll insect monsters are coming through, abducting humans for whatever reason, and occasionally returning but the cops can't write that up in their report.
The fear of the unknown plus the sisterly rapport missing from most interactions in THE PURGE or other horror films, combines to deliver a slow simmer anxiety. Bell has ingenious ways with seeing her missing husband and passing it off as a hallucination which makes for some interesting moments, and Parker has this real life body language and slow simmering beauty - you barely notice her at first and then suddenly wham, you're in love with her. ABSENTIA is the same way. It doesn't really ape any horror movie that came before it. If anything it reminded me SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE, they have a similar small human scale, naturalistic low-key lighting and actorly rapport, a story that snaps shut behind you, trips to lawyer offices that underscore the legal system's inability to protect the present from the darkness, and vaguely ominous two chord score making the less-is-more argument so intensely it gave me a chill right down to the bone.
I was so unnerved actually, after the end, the I had to fall back on my DVD of the 1957 classic, THE BEGINNING OF THE END right afterwards, to get some grounding. Nothing says you're safe and sound quite like watching Peter Graves shooting a machine gun at rear projected grasshopper. In 50's monster movies, at least, seeing is never the same as believing, and thank gods.
