Movie Review – The Purge

The Purge (2013) – In a new middle-of-the Apocalypse America the “New Founding Fathers” have instituted a new way to deal with the negative emotions of modern day life.  One day a year, for 12 hours, all laws are suspended and all emergency services are shut down.  For the 12 hours of the “purge” everyone is on their own.  In fact it is a cynical method of lowering the population and allowing the upper socio-economic classes to attack the poor.  The movie tracks one well to do family who ends up harboring a poor black man being pursued by a band of upper class psychopaths.

Let’s get this done upfront.  This movie is odious.  The script is idiotic, the characters (as they inevitably do in slasher films) insist on doing THE STUPIDEST POSSIBLE THINGS AT ALL TIMES, plus there’s the usual batch of horror cliche situations and characters.  The concepts of the movie are vile as well.  That a government might do such a thing is a common enough trope in fiction.  It might actually have been an interesting movie if we had been given a struggle between the ideologies expressed here.  But we don’t.  The movie glories in the atrocities, the violence and the gore.  The family at the center of the story survives more through luck than anything else. Even the tacked on “moral” at the ending is achieved with one final spurt of blood.

What may be even more horrifying than the movie itself is that people flocked to see it.  “The Purge” cost around three million dollars ($3,000,000) to make.  It’s domestic gross was sixty four million dollars ($64,000,000) and it added another twenty four million ($24,000,000) in the rest of the world.  There is no surprise in the fact that a sequel came out this year.  It’s done quite well as well.

To the folks who saw it when it first came out I can give a pass.  To the folks who knew what it was going to be and those who went and saw it more than once (you know some folks did), I say this – what the hell is the matter with you?

Do the world a favor, don’t put any more money in the pockets of the people who made this atrocity.

Rating – 1 *   I SO wanted to give this a “No Star” rating but that would be over the top.