Hey “The First Purge” Filmmakers, Your Metaphor on Class Warfare Doesn’t Work When Your Heroes Are Pieces of Shit CinemaWizardBoy Follow Jul 4, 2018 · 4 min read

Video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adsSo9W_F6A&feature=youtu.be

SPOOKY as FUCK

There is a scene in this movie where a girl is walking along the street. She walks by a storm drain and her ankle is lassoed by a rope-chain trap thing. People wearing doll masks pull her to them, spread her legs apart, and grope her. She kicks them away, runs down the street and yells “Pussy-grabbing motherfucker!”.

The First Purge is directed by Gerard McMurray, and unfortunately it is the 4th installment of The Purge Franchise and a prequel to the 2013 film “The Purge”. The premise behind these films of course is that once a year there is a 12 hour window in which all crime is legal, and this particular movie depicts the first “Purge” to ever occur.

I’m not going to pretend that I am a fan of this series. In fact, I think that all of them are pretty dreadful. The first one has Ethan Hawke and somehow it made me hate it even with him in it. Getting me to hate an Ethan Hawke movie is an achievement itself. It has always irked me when people say “Well, it’s a good concept”. I vehemently disagree, I’ve always thought the concept was over-the-top and totally ridiculous.

Despite my pure contempt for the Purge franchise, when I heard of the synopsis of this one, it did pique my interest slightly. Enough to where I would walk into the theater with an open mind. The idea behind this one is that it would show how the United States of America got to the point of accepting the “Purge Night”.

If I could be provided a somewhat believable and realistic explanation for how the Purge became an annual event, I could potentially enjoy this movie. We were at three strikes with The Purge, The Purge: Anarchy, and The Purge Election Year, and how many movie franchises have a good installment after three dismal ones? Still though, I was ready to accept this film for what it showed me, and I walked in without any preconceived notions as to what my reaction was going to be.

Essentially the plot is that the NFFA (the New Founding Fathers of America) have this idea to push the crime rate below 1% for the year. Obviously they decide to give a purge to one isolated community which doesn’t turn out to be a good idea because all hell breaks loose. The idea is to have Staten Island be the site of the first experiment. There is some socio-political commentary going on here with suggestions of class warfare, of the government perpetually keeping down the lower class, almost like the Purge is some sort of eugenics operation. There was definitely some of this talk in the previous Purge movies, but it seems like the filmmakers are really trying to capitalize on the increasing sense of political unrest in this country.

My main issue with this film is that we are given no legitimate reasons to cheer for what are supposed to be our protagonists. At the beginning, we see that there are mass protests against the Purge, but those in favor of it are people who have a financial incentive to join, because the government will give them money if they commit acts of murder. After the first twenty minutes, these protests are never seen again. The people who are WILLING TO KILL for money are our heroes. The filmmakers try to subvert this moral dilemma by saying that they are coerced to signing up for The Purge because of rampant poverty, but one of the MAIN protagonists in this movie SIGNS UP TO KILL PEOPLE because he has “leaks and roaches in his apartment”. You can’t tell me this couldn’t have been done better.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot that the plot of this movie makes ZERO FUCKING SENSE. Throughout the whole movie, the leader of the New Founding Fathers of America is watching The Purge with drones, constantly wondering if The Purge is “gonna work”. So many scenes with this guy, and we don’t even know what it means if it’s “gonna work”. What has to happen? How many people have to die? We finally get our questions answered about this almost an HOUR into the movie. It turns out they are fighting OVERPOPULATION. Now the country is overpopulated? Why would you bring this up an HOUR into the fucking movie?!?

I like the idea of trying to encapsulate our current political climate into the plot of a movie, but in this film we get crime is legal for 12 hours on staten island and the Ku Klux Klan shows up with assault rifles and starts mowing down minorities. It is so over the top, it takes you out the movie completely. This is supposed to be a horror franchise, but the whole time I was reminded of Rambo: First Blood Part II, which looks like a Best Picture winner compared to this piece of shit.

There only one actress who’d I consider well known with Marisa Tomei, who plays the Architect of this “Purge Experiment. Her performance is completely phoned in and unconvincing, just like everyone else in this movie.

There is scene where a woman takes a swig of booze from a flask and says “this tastes like old-man ass”. The main villain of this movie’s name is Skeletor. I’m not joking.

2/10. Horrendous, hardly a redeeming quality.