Five years ago, when The Purge was released, it was a deliciously dark slice of urban comeuppance that thrust viewers into a mad world where once a year, for just 12 hours, all crime, including murder, was legal. The privileged one percent, mostly white, locked themselves indoors and prayed to survive while anarchy raged outside.
It was a different time and a different climate way back in 2013. Barack Obama had just been sworn in for a second term. The international community was enjoying a period of relative peace. A movie like The Purge existed solely to titillate audiences and elicit a few shrieks of horror. And it was a hit, spawning two sequels that more fully embraced the film’s pulpy, B-movie roots by adding action star Frank Grillo.
Shit, as they say, has since gotten real.
We now live in Donald Trump’s America. The news regurgitates our setbacks and stumbles on the daily. White supremacists have emerged from the shadows to freely, and publicly, spew hate against African Americans, Muslims and any other minority demographic they choose. Immigrant families are being separated and detained like animals. Lies are accepted as truth and truth is ridiculed as paranoid propaganda.
The Purge franchise is no longer just grand guignol cinema for horror fans. This is revenge porn in its truest form, and it’s deeply troubling, because the Purge series has finally, and firmly, planted its thumb on the pulse of American division and upheaval.
And, with The First Purge released — without irony — on Independence Day, it’s now clear that these films are little more than big-screen versions of the same camera-phone-recorded viral videos of prejudice and abject violence for violence’s sake that we’re inundated with every day.
As a prequel, The First Purge shows how a myriad of social and economic issues gave birth to a new, third political party — the New Founding Fathers of America — which takes the White House in a landslide and immediately moves to initiate The Experiment.
The Experiment, which later is rebranded as the Purge, is set to be launched on Staten Island, New York because of its melting pot of impoverished communities. Residents are enticed to stay on the island for the 12-hour-duration in return for receiving $5,000 apiece. More money is offered to any citizens who knowingly agree to participate in the event, meaning kill other people. In a cool bit of technology, all participants receive a subdermal tracking device and a pair of contact lenses that broadcasts everything they see and do back to the NFFA headquarters.
Make no mistake, the NFFA is basically a less orange carbon copy of the current administration in Washington, D.C., but just as infuriating and unnerving.
Ground zero for The Experiment is deemed a low-income tenement building, Park Hill Tower, which is where the film’s protagonists, Nya (Lex Scott Davis) and her younger brother Isaiah (Joivan Wade), live in near squalor.
Nya is an activist, raging against the implementation of The Experiment. Isaiah works a corner for local drug lord Dmitri (an impressive Y’lan Noel), who also is Nya’s ex-boyfriend.
The Experiment, as we learn, is the brainchild of psychologist Dr. Updale, played by Marisa Tomei in what’s likely the worst role of her storied career. Tomei barely has any dialogue, other than to spout gobbledygook about how basic dogmas must be rejected and tenets of morality shunned in order for The Experiment to be a success.
Violence, we’re told, has to be exorcised and exercised in order for peace and prosperity to reign. If the Staten Island experiment is successful, the NFFA promises to push for a nationwide Purge (which we already know will happen).
James DeMonaco, the architect of the franchise (he wrote and directed the first three films), returns to script The First Purge, but cedes the director’s chair to Gerard McMurray, marking his second feature film. McMurray does a decent job capturing the chaos, even if several of his big set pieces, including an extended trip through a dimly lit alley populated with abandoned stuffed animals rigged with explosives, feel like a bigger-budget Scare Zone from Halloween Horror Nights.
Other moments, like a vicious firefight between elderly Africa-American and Hispanic residents protecting their homes and loved ones from a mixed group of paramilitary soldiers (some in blackface) and KKK militia men, are eerily prescient.
Truth be told, I’ve never loved any of the previous Purge films, and The First Purge didn’t move my needle much. It’s a good genre film that’s consistently undermined by a plethora of plot holes. For example, the first person you see onscreen is a creepy-looking nihilist nicknamed Skeletor (Rotimi Paul), who is basically the poster child for the purge. DeMonaco works extra hard to set up a showdown between Skeletor and Isaiah, but when it comes, it’s over in a flash and leaves you feeling underwhelmed.
But The First Purge, more than any of the previous films, works on a visceral level, in part due to current affairs.
It no longer feels farfetched to imagine something similar taking place in the United States. We’ve all but destroyed civility and common sense. We’re narrowing the lines between the Haves and the Have-Nots, based on skin color and country of origin. We’ve isolated ourselves from long-standing international alliances. And we’re making bedfellows out of dictators and despots.
One of the (many) sobering thoughts that struck me watching The First Purge was that it's likely audience members will be equally divided. For many, the good guys will be the hardscrabble drug dealers and welfare recipients who band together to protect their community. But, for an equally large percentage, the good guys might just be the New Founding Fathers of America and the armed militias they enlist to hit the streets for 12 hours of ethnic cleansing, and that's absolutely fucking terrifying.
As one character says early on, the purge represents “the greatest shitshow on Earth,” and a chance for a bunch of political fringe-dwellers to turn “Staten Island into ancient Rome.”
I think it’s fair to say that many people will be struck by this thought as they leave the theater: What’s scarier, the movie we just watched or what’s unfolding in real time all around us right now?
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
This article appears in Jul 5-12, 2018.