The Purge (2013)

It's the rare film that allows you to feel yourself physically getting dumber as you watch it. I suppose that's an impressive feat to have accomplished, as "The Purge" managed to do, but it's still not something I would be too proud of were I the makers of it. After all that puts them in league with "Transformers Revenge of The Fallen" and "Howard the Duck" in terms of creating something so apocalyptically stupid that you can feel the synapses in your brain firing back on themselves and imploding while it's playing.

I get it, you know. I'm not dense. I understand metaphor and the concept of a morality play. I can see what "The Purge" is trying to say: That the wealthy in this country have no concept of apathy for those who do not in turn posses wealth, and in fact they would rather them all die to relieve the haves of the horrible strain of having to lend any kind of reluctant, kicking and screaming help to the have-nots. And in the end, we are all horrible animals that will rip each other to pieces given the slightest provocation or opportunity, the odds of which go up exponentially the more wealth you have. I get it, "The Purge." It wasn't difficult to catch since you're about as stealthy with it as an air-horn in a library.

And you know what? Maybe they're right. There is probably something of a point to be made there. The wealth gap in this country is inexcusable, and there is such a massive focus on what is good for a microscopic fraction at the top that the surging masses of everyone else below them gets completely ignored.

But for crying rivers of blood, there is such a thing as subtlety. The best tales of social commentary don't shove symbolism and morals in your face in outrageous over-the-top antics that come across closer to parody than parallel. They are more sneaky with it. What they don't do is create an America where once every year, in an effort to cull the lower class/poor people/unemployed, for 12 hours all crime is completely legal in an activity called "The Purge." This, naturally, means that everyone with the money to have one barricades themselves inside their massive fortress of a home, while everyone else who doesn't have that luxury immediately goes out and kills anyone they can get their hands on in an orgy of blood, since that's what people like to do. Actually a number of rich people go out and hunt poorer people because hey, what are they gonna do? NOT kill someone? That's what any normal person would like to do, right? That's typical healthy behavior yeah? I mean, they're poor. It's not like they're human beings or anything.

Wow. That's so sneaky that I barely saw what you did there.

The amount of stupid contained in the description on the back of the DVD alone is enough to make my head hurt. That's just a dumb, DUMB plot. How in the hell was that even supposed to have come to pass in the film's far future setting of 2022? Did the Tea Party really become that powerful in that time frame? Actually I don't even think they'd go so far as to implement a policy of genocide on the poor, even though they'd probably like the thought even if they wouldn't say it out loud. I just don't think they'd be able to collect the votes to pass that particular legislation through the Senate. Or is this the end result of the Affordable Health Care Act? Is this what Ted Cruz is talking about when he says that's going to be the end of America? Are we going to starting Purging in less than a decade? I guess that's how it starts: First you have people getting health care, then soon we're all piles of bodies in the streets. Man, I had no idea.

Thanks, Obama.

Ethan Hawke is James, a successful maker of home security systems who has made like a good hard-working capitalist and made a lot of money selling his wares to other families on his block, all of whom live in mansions the size of a damn football field. Naturally he's got quite the elaborate setup when it comes to his own home security. This comes in handy when, during the Purge, his son Charlie (Max Burkholder) lets in a bloody homeless man who remains nameless throughout (Edwin Hodge) in an effort to save him from a mob led by a likewise nameless psycho in a mask (Rhys Wakefield). Psycho kindly informs James that unless he hands over the homeless guy, they'll bust in and kill James and his entire family.

That's the setup, but most of the film is following James and the rest of his family around in the dark as they attempt to navigate their impossibly large house in an effort to find the guy so they can throw him to the wolves. They try and work in some mild tension like it's attempting to be a horror film, but all it boils down to is someone suddenly appearing behind someone else accompanied by an orchestra sting like it's the scariest thing in the world, a cliche which is so transparent and worn out that at this point it's really no more frightening than a sneeze.

Pictured above - Every crap horror movie you've ever seen.

At no point did I give two craps about anyone in this story. James is a bland character with no personality to speak of. His wife Mary (Lena Headey) is a hypocritical harpy who condemns James for choosing to protect his family, calling him a terrible person when he agrees to let the stranger die so that they all may live, saying bullcrap like "What have we become?" when she's supported the Purge for years. I'm not saying that's the right choice for him to make, but that's because there IS no right choice to make in that situation. That's a lose-lose scenario, and he took the path that most people would: The one that keeps his family alive. That's an understandable decision for James to make, but Mary basically calls him a monster for making it. But that's not to say she's above expecting him to kill when the walls come down and the masked people start pouring in. Oh no. Then she's all about him becoming a killer. What a hypocrite. I can't stand characters like that. I wouldn't have minded as much if we weren't obviously meant to be on her side.

And naturally, the film ends with the rich neighbors coming to help James and his family, only to turn on them because they wanted to be the ones to kill them. Why is that? Well, because he's successful and made money off of them, that's why. Of course, this makes no sense since they're all rich anyway and becoming more rich would probably be applauded in that particular circle, especially considering that it's the poor people who are supposed to die according to this idiotic premise, but hey why would the movie start being not-stupid at the end? So the homeless guy ends up saving those who are still alive, and the Purge ends with the neighbors meekly walking back home as if everything isn't going to be horribly awkward from now on.

I pose a serious question: Have you ever seen a more punchable face? This is our villain, people...

I most admit that this film made me feel physically bad, and not in the way I believe the filmmakers were intending, either. I was so enraged at the notion that every single person, not matter who they are or where they're from, is inherently a psychopath who would gladly kill someone else if only they had half a chance. I'm no starry-eyed optimist or anything, but I generally believe that while the average person at their core may be selfish, they do not wish harm on others under normal circumstances, and the average person would probably not find the prospect of killing an attractive one.

And that's on top of it making me sick to my stomach due to a horrible script, terrible acting, and lack of any tension, horror or suspense. By the way, it must be said that the absolute fastest way to ensure that the audience knows that you don't really give a rat's ass about actually being scary is to simply slap stupid masks on the villains and have them prance around and shriek like a bunch of babbling lunatics. That doesn't make me afraid of them. That makes me wonder why they haven't been locked up because they're clearly insane and could not function in any kind of society, no matter how messed up it is.

Yeah, "The Purge," I played "BioShock," too. That was a good game. Stop ripping it off because you suck at it.

You know what "The Purge" is? I'll bet this is what paranoid, Right Wing fringe maniacs thinks everyone else thinks of them. It's like looking into Alex Jones' head. That's a scary place to be, and I feel like I need a shower.

For crying out loud, the trailer plays "America the Beautiful." FREAKING. SUBTLE.

THE BOTTOM LINE - I hated "The Purge." I hated, hated, hated, hated it. This movie would be laughed off as a pathetic failed attempt at a third-rate home invasion movie in the best of scenarios, but the fact that it's trying to say something but being terribly inept at doing so sinks it even lower into the hole that it dug itself with it's blunt instrument of clumsy allegory. This is a terrible film whose only market is vapid high school girls who might think it's really "deep" because they're stupid and "scary" because they've never seen an actual horror movie in their life.

Sinister (2012)

Not quite sure where to start with "Sinister." For me this is kind of the definition of "mixed feelings." I thought it was creepy but I never got scared. The characters were likeable but also annoying. The story was stupid nonsense but it still was intriguing. It's well made but it keeps shooting itself in the foot. This is a confusing movie to work out my feelings on. On the plus side though, at least it's a horror movie that is rated R. Not for any good reason, mind you, but there it is.

The film starts off well enough, to be sure. The very first thing we see is an old 8 mm film of what appears to be a family of four being hanged from a tree. Aside from the obvious disturbing nature of what we're seeing, it's a very effectively creepy moment because it is quiet, underplayed and subtle (which is unfortunately the last time I'll be able to say that). We don't see who is killing them, because that's going to be the mystery that our main character is going to be trying to unravel. Not that it's hard for us to figure out, but it's best to get used to being smarter than the characters whenever you watch any horror movie, just as a general rule.

Our protagonist is Ellison (Ethan Hawke), a true-crime novelist who has hit a patch of hard times recently, and has started writing a new book which he hopes will be his return to success. The book will be about the hangings we saw in the opening scene. So he moves with his wife (who irritatingly doesn't know the difference between "hanged" and "hung") and two kids to the small town where the hangings happened, as I guess it's required that he actually take up residence in the town where the crime happened in order for him to write about it. I have no explanation for that. Even more perplexing is that not only does he evidently need to live in the same town, but he's gone and moved himself and his family into the murder house, while somehow keeping that gem of an idea a secret from them. Because THAT'S a great idea, right?

The movie hasn't even started and already you're a titanic douchebag.

When Ellison finds a box in the attic containing a projector and old 8 mm films, he does what any normal person would do and watches one of them - which turns out to be the video of the hanging we saw in the beginning of the film. He then proceeds to do what most people wouldn't do, and keeps watching them. There's also film of families getting drowned, getting burned alive, getting their throats cut, all that various good stuff. And he never tells anyone about it. Here is the first point when Ellison as a character becomes pretty unlikable.

I understand that he's intrigued by the mystery, and the investigator in him needs to solve it, but there does come a point where common sense should play a little bit of a role. He's got snuff films in his attic which clearly could only have been left by either the killer, someone directly involved in the killings, some evil supernatural force, or all the above. I think at that point the safety of your family should start to become a real concern.

You know, as silly as this was, I'm sure it looked even sillier on paper.

And I'm not saying that it's completely unreasonable that a person would ever do that. It's true that Ellison is stuck in an awkward situation where he's running the risk of losing his wife if his circumstances were to come to light, but not only did he put himself in that position, the underlying reason he's doing all this is because he doesn't want to write anything but true crime novels. It's made clear that he does have options of doing other things to support his family like writing textbooks or whatnot, but he feels it's beneath him and he refuses to do it. So our main character is a guy whose professional pride is the reason he refuses to GTFO when all the crazy spooky stuff starts going down around his wife and kids. Nice guy.

But even though he's a tool, Ellison isn't a bad character, and Ethan Hawke actually does a good job in portraying him. I enjoyed his performance, and it's a credit to Hawke's acting that he made me kind of like Ellison. Even though he was a total chump, he was a believable chump. And there was something intriguing about his blind obsession with needing to know the truth no matter the cost that was in itself something like another layer of whatever horror "Sinister" is trying to convey.

I'm not saying it was completely effective here, but some of the best horror movies know that one of the scariest things you can have is a character that knows they shouldn't do something, but they also know that they have no choice, either through circumstance or basic human need. It's that Lovecraftian angle that knows damn well that you're going to read that Forbidden Tome of Ultimate Knowledge even though it's a forgone conclusion that it will drive you insane, and that's the nature of man. You're going to read the Tome, you're going to open the head-sized box sent from the serial killer, and you're going to smell that milk that expired 2 weeks ago. Because dammit, you need to know.

Pictured - The Great Struggle of Man

And that leads into the best bit of Ellison's character arc, which is closer to the end when he plows forward into this darkness that he finds himself trapped in, even though he knows that it's really, really bad to do so. The image of Hawke, whiskey in hand, sitting beside the projector that has mysteriously reappeared after he had previously burned it, flipping the switch to play the last reel of film was one of the more chilling aspects of "Sinister." You know he's screwed, he knows he's screwed, but at that point he just doesn't care. He's got to know.

For the sake of spoilers I'm not going to give away what's going on, but that doesn't mean it's a twist of "Bruce Willis was dead" proportions. It's actually pretty obvious what's happening, which leads into the other problem with the character of Ellison, which is that for a guy who solves unsolved crimes for a living, he's sure slow to pick up on the obvious. True, there's a supernatural angle going on that he refuses to believe, which is understandable, but even from a forensics standpoint there are some things that are painfully obvious that anyone could have noticed.

I'm just saying that when you have film reels of families getting murdered with no motive or suspect to be found, and in each and every case the one child who was not seen on the tapes went missing afterwards, at some point I'd entertain the possibility that perhaps, JUST PERHAPS the child had something to do with it. I'm just saying.

This isn't the fault of "Sinister," to be fair. It's just that we've had so many movies like this that twists of this nature can be seen coming a mile away. That's a shame, but there it is. If you watch movies with regularity you know what's up. I can see how it would be shocking though if you didn't, because honestly it is pretty messed up what happens. And that is far more effective at being creepy than the overused jump scares that litter this film, which ends up being its biggest detriment.

The last shot of the film. Seriously. What are you doing? Why did you suddenly bend over at 150 mph and tilt your head to the side? What are you looking at? The camera? Is this a fourth wall break? You've never broken the fourth wall before. Why now? Do you know that the end credits are coming? Do you know you're in a movie? Can you hear the music? Does music always erupt from the aether whenever you bend over?

I could go on for days about how much I hate jump scares, but I won't. There's a big difference between being scared and being startled, but most horror films seem to think the two are interchangeable, oftentimes completely relying on the later since it requires far less work since building atmosphere is tougher than simply banging pots together and yelling "Boo." This film is no different, as things will jump out at the screen at us, proceeded by an orchestral sting loud enough to rupture spleens. To the film's credit I can't recall any time when something innocuous was used in an attempt to scare, as there were no kittens jumping out of closets, but at the same time it seems afraid that we won't think something is scary enough without the loud boom.

Honestly there are some really creepy parts in "Sinister," and all of the best ones involve (shock) no music. There's only about two of them, but those moments made me sad because had the rest of the film been as subtle and clever as that, then we're talking really scary stuff. I mean actually scary, not akin to playing with a jack-in-the-box.

Like this bit. Who'd have thought the best scare in the film would have no music sting?

And that's what I was mostly talking about with the whole "shoot yourself in the foot" thing I mentioned earlier. This could have been a really scary film. Instead it's just kind of creepy as long as you don't think about it too hard, and it's not confident enough in itself to believe that what it has to offer is actually frightening. Instead it throws the jumps scares at us to artificially make it scary for people who don't understand the difference. That's a shame.

If you want to watch the entire film in 2 minutes and 30 seconds...here's the trailer.

THE BOTTOM LINE - "Sinister" was an alright film. Definitely better than some of the other horror films released recently, but it's still kind of "meh" at best. It gets points for some good acting and a couple of well done segments, but like most horror movies it's too reliant on jumps scares for me to give it too much credit or recommendation.