The Purge And The Pain

I have to hand it to The Purge. It's been awhile since a movie borderline enraged me. I run at a real even keel and with all the lousy movies I see, a bad movie is usually the last thing to get under my skin. Hell, most times I enjoy them - but I found The Purge to be such an unforgivable failure on every level that it put me in a sour mood for awhile afterwards. I can definitely tell you that I'll be avoiding all movies written and directed by James DeMonaco in the future. Maybe even ones starring Ethan Hawke, too, just to be safe.

Let's start with the premise, which defies all sense. At some point in the not-so-far future, the US passes a law establishing an annual "Purge Night" during which all crime is legal. The psychological reason behind this being that, given an opportunity to "unleash the beast," that people will be more docile during the rest of the year.

Any successful sci-fi concept has to have a kernel of believability and "Purge Night" doesn't have that. There are many outrageous concepts that can be accepted as within the realm of plausibility but "Purge Night" isn't one of them. This movie would have us believe that people can just go back to their normal lives after a night where their neighbors, co-workers, family members, what have you, have gone out to murder people. The absurdity of that is a hump I can't get over. To even begin to make this concept work, you'd have to take it to a Star Trek sort of level where it's another planet, another species - something where it can be more readily appreciated as an allegorical thing and not something that's taking place in a world that's just barely removed from our own.

And if the idea of Purge Night is that all crime is legal for a 12-hour span and that the solution to surviving it is to go into lockdown with your family, that fails to take into account the possibility that many family members would happily turn on each other on such a night. Not to be overly cynical but how many disgruntled teens or unhappy spouses would let their resentments build up for a year and then take the opportunity to slay their siblings, or parents, or significant others? On a night where murder is legal, being locked in with your family is not exactly the best way to stay safe. Far from it, in fact!

On top of how daft the premise is, the movie additionally requires that every character must act moronic in order to keep the storyline moving. You have to believe that the young son of Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey's characters is a) dumb enough to let a stranger into their house but also b) that he knows the home security code and c) that Hawke and Headey are not keeping a constant eye on their kids during purge night. When you have a night where all hell's breaking loose and there's no recourse to the law, no matter how tight your home security system is you'd think that any parent would insist on everyone sticking close. You'd also think that people would have, at the very least, some concrete bunker action going on. Which brings me to another area of absurdity: Hawke's character sells home security systems and yet we find out that these high-end systems aren't worth a dime. Once a group of would-be purgers decide to break into Hawke's home in order to get to the man that has taken shelter there, it takes them about a hot minute to bust in. Reinforcing how ill-thought out The Purge's premise is, all Hawke can say to Headey when it's clear that their security system is nothing but show are words to the effect of: "Hey, no system is impenetrable! Anyone can get in if they really want to!" Um, shouldn't that be the exact situation that your system is explicitly built for - the times when someone really does want to get in to kill you and they're willing to sweat a little bit to do it? If your system isn't Purge Proof, then some additional work is needed.

Even with all this, had the B-movie goods been delivered, I would have given a pass to The Purge's many illogical elements but yet it completely fails to satisfy on the action front.

While there is plenty of gunplay on tap and various instances of interpersonal mayhem, none of it is handled with any gusto or flair. More critically, a half-hearted anti-violence message is offered during the climax, which allows several heinous characters - characters who were willing to slaughter children - to survive all but completely unscathed and, man, that just doesn't cut it. After asking an audience to swallow such an idiotic premise, to then not reward them with the kind of visceral payoff that might have made it worthwhile and instead basically smugly scold them for even expecting a bloody payoff, is just an outrageous slap in the face.

And in the situation as it plays out in The Purge, the refrain from violence that happens is absolutely absurd. No one would just let things go at the point that they do. No one that you'd ever care to sympathize or identify with, that's for sure. So what you end up with is a movie about "purging the beast" that denies the viewer of any kind of catharsis. How useless is that?

Thanks to its big opening weekend, this nonsense is already getting a sequel and to my mind there's only one thing that could possibly make a Purge 2 watchable - make The Purge be a random event. No more annual Purge Night. Instead, it happens at a random time, on a random day. People are at work, at the mall, out to dinner, whatever. Everything is normal and then sirens go off announcing the beginning of the purge. Then you're really in a dicey situation.

Sure, the idea that the government - or anyone - would think that a Random Purge is a sensible, healthy idea is insane but so is the idea of The Purge itself so why not go with it? I know it'd make for a wild movie.

As for The Purge, well I'm feeling calmer about it now. But not so calm that I'm about to forget it was one of the worst movies I've seen - if not arguably the worst (seriously!) - in a very long time.

Sinister Sights

It's not often that mainstream American horror actually freaks me out. I enjoy it (well, some of it) but it's mostly junk food and I enjoy it on that level. I can't say that Sinister disturbed me in the way that recent foreign fare like I Saw The Devil has but it unsettled me more than I would've expected so I rate that as a notable accomplishment.

It's not a perfect film but its flaws fade in importance next to the ruthless approach taken by director Scott Derrickson and writer C. Robert Cargill. These guys were clearly out to make a serious horror movie and they succeeded admirably.

The plot is straight out of Horror 101. Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), a true crime author, has seen his career take a prolonged dip after his one big success ten years prior. Chasing another win, he moves his wife and two young kids into a house in which the previous family came to a grisly end. Ellison has neglected to tell his family that the specific house they've moved into was the scene of the very crime he's writing about but if this book pans out the way Ellison hopes, all will be forgiven. Despite these good intentions, it shouldn't surprise anyone when I say moving into the house proves to be a lousy idea.

Ellison discovers a box in the attic containing a Super 8 movie projector along with several reels of film. Ellison starts screening these films in the privacy of his office and he sees not just glimspes of family gatherings but also the horrific murders of these families. Ellison at first starts to call the police about this discovery but then opts to keep it to himself, believing that this will be his true ticket to fame.

The more Ellison delves into the mystery of these films and the history behind these various murders, the worse things get. Soon, Ellison is experiencing weird hallucinations and whatever is going on is seeping into his kid's minds as well with both his son and daughter showing signs of knowing about past events in the house.

Like I said, the story isn't much and anyone with even a passing familiarity with the horror genre won't be surprised by the basic path that Sinister takes. What elevates it is the abundance of disturbing imagery, an almost single-mindedly grim approach that's rare in US horror, and Christopher Young's striking score. As much as certain elements in Sinister are overly familiar (the movie freely cribs from various sources - the most obvious being The Shining and Manhunter) and as much as characterization is a mixed bag, my inner skeptic was continually forced to sit down and shut up by how well Derrickson mounts his shocks.

Some of the big scares are spoiled by the trailers but I'm not complaining. In fact, knowing a few moments were coming in advance probably saved me from being wheeled out of the theater on a gurney. Sinister isn't a film that gets everything right but it delivers dread with a sure hand.

If you're looking for something scary to see in the theaters this October (and if you're reading this blog, you're probably always looking for something scary to see in theaters) I don't see how you could do much better than Sinister.

Daybreakers

Simultaneously ingenious and half-brained, Daybreakers is better than what usually gets released in the dumping ground of January but there's still good reason why this didn't get released at a more competitive time of year. Written and directed by the Spierig Brothers, this tale of a future in which vampires are the dominant species is chock full of neat details involving how vampires manage their day-to-day (or rather night-to-night) existence. We see how their cars, their houses, their work places, are all designed to keep these busy bloodsuckers safe. It's a cool, elaborately conceived world that the Spierigs have come up with. However, in crucial areas their logic gives out and Daybreakers' story of the urgent race to invent a blood substitute before the world's supply of the real thing runs dry is something less than special.

In theory, it's a decent idea to hang a movie on - one with a topical metaphor to boot - what happens to a species when it burns through its natural resources? But that the vampires have allowed their situation to progress so far before discovering a valid way to cope with it seems, well, bloody ridiculous. When it's announced that there's only a month's (!) worth of blood left to sustain the vampire race, you have to wonder - who's running this monkey farm?

Research is being done to find a blood substitute but in the meantime, the vampire's management of their limited resources leaves a lot to be desired. Perhaps you could say that it's only a fitting analogy given our own less-than-perfect skills in harvesting the natural world but it feels more like the Spierigs wanted to start their story with vampire society off a crisis point and didn't care how much sense it made. Had they introduced the idea of a plague unexpectedly wiping out a majority of the human population, that would've been better - anything other than "whoops, gettin' low on blood now!"

So right off the (vampire) bat, Daybreakers is one of those movies were the characters are forced to behave like idiots in order to serve the story - like the questionable logic behind humans who choose to travel by nighttime in a world populated by vampires. When you have an underground movement of humans who need to live by their wits so strategically challenged that they transport a large group of survivors in the dead of night only to run afoul of a vampire attack, that's just bad writing. You'd think these people would have a pretty hard and fast rule about putting as many odds in their favor as possible and only make long journeys during the day, but that's just me. In another scene, these crack survivalists let a vampire they're hoping to recruit to their cause wander out of the room unattended to take a phone call (because he definitely couldn't be talking to the vampire police force that's hunting them down!) - causing one to wonder how it's possible that they've managed to last so long without being caught or killed.

While the film's pseudo-science has been given plenty of thought by the Spierigs, the rest of the movie - not so much. Conceptually, one the biggest missteps is that they've made it look so miserable to be a vampire. The Spierigs have come with with all kinds of cool tech to facilitate their vampire's nocturnal lifestyle but they forgot to make it look appealing - past the opportunity for immortality - to actually be a vampire. These creatures may be at the top of the food chain, but feeding on the world must not all that because every one of them looks bored to tears - which is funny, because this movie takes place in 2019, just ten years after the vampire plague has hit humanity. That's hardly long enough for the ennui of living forever to set in. And save for a couple of characters, apparently being a vampire in this movie also has the unfortunate side effect of turning you into an evil asshole, making the film seem very one-dimensional in its outlook (and again, the timeline is problematic - would so many people who were human in the recent past be so quick to erase their sympathies for humanity?). The Spierigs do have a pretty terrific cast on their hands, though - I never thought I'd see Ethan Hawke, Sam Neill and William Dafoe all together in a frigging vampire movie but here it is.

Some horror fans will rush to embrace Daybreakers just for the fact that it's a new vampire movie that, with its hard-R bloodletting and lack of romance, is proudly not in the Twilight camp. But it's also not very good. While Daybreakers is an improvement over the Spierigs' first film, Undead (2003), as storytellers they've still got a ways to go. Style, however, is something they've got in spades - the Spierigs give plenty of kick to the action scenes here.

With its solid cast, fast-pace, and striking visuals, Daybreakers is never less than watchable. The problem is, as soon as you give it any thought, it crumbles away to nothing - like a vampire at dawn.