Three Films Make A Post: Even if I kill you, I won't forget.

Werewolves (2024): This werewolf plague movie by Steven C. Miller is absolutely a SyFy original movie script of the style before these films discovered “irony” someone threw a bit of money at. As such, it is pretty dumb, doesn’t think about any of the actual implications – the mind-breaking horror and utter trauma - of its set-up that would make for a more interesting movie, and instead turns into a Frank Grillo and company versus werewolves shoot ‘em up with occasional cool gore effects.

Which I’d be fine with if Miller’s direction were a bit more inspired, or a bit more dynamic, or a bit grittier instead of being workmanlike and okay, and so full of lens flare some scenes genuinely look as if someone had farted light at the screen.

Flow aka Straume (2024): If it were nothing else, this is a brilliant example how much individuality and personality can fit into unashamedly digital animation – these things really don’t all need to look like Pixar. Of course, there’s quite a bit more to Gints Zilbalodis’s tale of a cat and her increasingly large group of animal friends roaming what looks a lot like the more pleasant part of a post-climate apocalypse world. There’s no dialogue here, but a lot of expressive animal noises (watching this at home with a cat would prove interesting, I believe), and animation so emotionally expressive, I certainly wasn’t missing dialogue or voice overs.

There’s a sense of wonder as well as one of melancholia running through the film, and where its plot is at its core simple and very generic, its artistic impression is singular and individual, leaving an immense emotional impact.

Heavier Trip aka Hevimpi reissu (2024): Where the first Heavy Trip was a delightful example of a comedy about misguided but loveable enthusiasts, its sequel by original directors and writers Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren is rather less successful.

Too much of the film consists of re-treads of rock music comedy standards that hit only about half of the time; everything here feels more generic than it did in the first film, less heartfelt and more professionally competent.

Which doesn’t turn this into a terrible film, just one I don’t see myself returning to very often, or at all.

Three Films Make A Post: Crime runs in the family

Ida Red (2021): If ever you needed proof that making relatively simple genre movies is actually much more difficult than some filmmakers seem to believe, John Swab’s crime family drama should be it. Clearly thinking itself part of the great American tradition of these films, in truth is only a revue of its greatest clichés, wasting a really wonderful cast (Josh Hartnett, Frank Grillo, William Forsythe, Deborah Ann Woll, and so on) on material that never feels fully thought through beyond copying the surface of better films. This is particularly problematic in a film that clearly wants the audience to feel for a murderous shithead like Hartnett’s character, but never delivers anymore reason for it than him loving his mum and criminal overlady (who is even more horrible than he is, because Freud), and that is, at least treated in this superficial way, simply not enough.

Kajillionaire (2020): I like director/writer/renaissance artist Miranda July’s earlier films quite a bit, despite their nearness to the dreaded mumblecore, particularly for their ability to make the weird feel strangely logical and human. Here, working in a somewhat higher budget bracket, July’s still holding up the flag of genuine weirdness, occasionally hitting on an image or a scene that’s breath-taking and quietly daring in its individuality.

But she’s also clearly aiming for deep, emotional resonance here, something I didn’t feel at all, because in this version of July’s world, everything’s either inhumanly weird or an obvious metaphor, and neither of these things is what makes me feel actual emotions.

A House on the Bayou (2021): For the first half hour of its runtime or so, I was all in for Alex McAuley’s Blumhouse-produced streaming movie, on account of its very specific mood of southern weirdness, and despite its plot focus on rich peoples’ marital problems and the eternal search for veal cutlets.

Alas, after that strong start, the film turns into a godawful mess of random plot twists, inane ideas, and decent ideas realized inanely. There’s simply no way for the film to bring all of its disparate ideas together into anything like a whole – or really, anything like an actual movie. Instead, it just throws nonsense at the audience without even pretending there’s much hope it might stick. Because that’s not annoying enough, the thing feels really rather enamoured with a particularly mediaeval idea of morals as well, as if all the dumb talk about the horror genre’s innate reactionary core were actually true.

Three Films Make A Post: Get a Lift

Harry and Tonto (1974): Having lost his home to city development, and not really jibing with living with his son and his family, elderly New Yorker Harry (Art Carney) and his cat Tonto (Tonto) go on a road trip through the USA, encountering old flames and new experiences, living parts of life Harry never did before. Among other things, for this Paul Mazursky comedy is stuffed full with humanity and human encounters big and small, feelings simple and complicated, treating aging and old age and the loss that comes with it with as much dignity as humour, exhibiting an openness to different ways of seeing the world that seems to be utterly alien to today’s “you’re either for us or against us” world.

Mazursky creates (or sees) an America made out of very different people believing very different things that still express a shared humanity, never making a grand gesture out of this, but treating his characters kindly, even those that might not completely deserve it.

A Man Called Sledge (1970): This is one of two movies directed by actor Vic Morrow, though producer Dino DeLaurentiis apparently robbed him of the final cut, and there may or may not be material included shot by Giorgio Gentili instead. Despite an American cast, director and US money, in feeling and tone, this is a lot like an Italian Western, starting with its treatment of the Southwestern setting, over the “sweat and dirty shirts” production design, and certainly not ending in its pretty cynical view of the world. The film also includes a pretty hefty heist movie element and ends up as a Treasure of the Sierra Madre variation.

It features James Garner in one of his grimmer performances as the titular gunman Sledge, and moves through its set pieces of dust and mud with a degree of vigour. It never quite manages to reach the allegorical heft the director – at least going by the final act – clearly wants it to have, but then, I dislike allegories anyway. In the state it is in, it’s a solid enough movie, not as well directed as the best Italian westerns (nor as crazy as these can get) but entertaining enough for what it is.

Jiu Jitsu (2020): On the plot level, this thing directed by Dimitri Logothethis is a completely bizarre attempt to mix martial arts movie traditions with a Predator rip-off, plus the dreaded amnesiac protagonist (Alain Moussi is our hero, such as he is) syndrome. And Nicolas Cage is a crazy jiu jitsu swordsman veteran (jiu jitsu in this film has little to do with the actual martial art, by the way), so you can expect a couple of scenes of Cage flipping out entertainingly, doing his best in martial arts fight scenes against people who are actually good at this sort of thing, and doing an Obi Wan (just louder). Also appearing are action and martial arts film darlings like Tony Jaa and Frank Grillo, but they only get a couple of fights in. Moussi is good in his action sequences but pretty terrible at the whole acting thing. He was probably much cheaper than those members of the cast who can do both; but then, the script is so utterly bad at stringing the decent, sometimes fun, action scenes together, even a great actor might have not gotten through the affair with dignity intact.

Three Films Make A Post: He's good at taking friends

Come Play (2020): If you are one of those peculiar people who think The Babadook isn’t great, you might like Jacob Chase’s risible rip-off instead. After all, it does replace careful writing and thoughtful characterisation with jump scares and regurgitated tropes, grinds down the personality of the original in favour of bland slickness and basically sands down everything that’s good about the film it is ripping off into nothing, while not even acknowledging the debt officially. It’s everything that doesn’t work about contemporary mainstream horror squashed into a single film, without anything about this part of the movie universe that’s actually worthwhile and good (and there’s a lot of that to go) making an appearance.

In a way, the film’s total, nearly aggressive, blandness is some kind of achievement, I’m sure, but not one anyone should be proud of.

Boss Level (2020): By all rights, a film by Joe Carnahan about Frank Grillo as a man of violence with the usual problems finding himself caught in a time loop, fighting ridiculous caricatures again and again, should at the very least be a pretty fun watch. It never really was one for me, though. The film’s ironic use of clichés is never actually as smart and funny as it apparently believes it is, and the attempts of making an audience connect with Grillo’s character suffer heavily from him being a vapid idiot and an arsehole (and not the interesting kind) whose rise to heroism is something the film declares instead of actually doing anything to convince the audience of.

The action is perfectly okay, but I wish the filmmakers had taken a good hard look at a lot of low budget action movies with basic plots but heavy emotional stakes, skipped the ironic sneer, and instead learned something from them about how to creatively turn violence into an expression of a dozen different emotions.

Moonshine County Express (1977): Hicksploitation and carsploitation have never been my greatest loves in exploitation cinema, so I’m not sure if my enjoying Gus Trikonis’s example of the form more than most would be a recommendation to anyone who actually likes the sub-genre. It’s certainly always nice to find a female-led (Susan Howard, Claudia Jennings and Maureen McCormick) exploitation film that takes said females’ attempts at taking vengeance on the killers of her dead dad (Morgan Woodward working for William Conrad are the guilty parties) seriously, adding John Saxon as the male helper, but really not making him terribly effectual or useful, and letting the villains and the women drive the plot.

Stylistically, Trikonis moves convincingly from mid-70s style brutal-ish shoot-outs, to corny but mostly inoffensive humour, to a bit of drama, and to the mandatory car chases and back again, letting things get a little weird from time to time as they should be in exploitation cinema, yet finding his way back from there, too.

Reprisal (2018)

Bank manager Jacob (Frank Grillo) is having a bit of a bad time. His bank is robbed by a violent guy operating in a military style (who the audience will soon enough see is being played by Jonathon Schaech), with little he or anyone else can do about it. The perpetrator seems to be a serial operator, too, leaving empty banks and dead bodies behind without the police getting any closer to him.

The special unit chasing him does vaguely seem to insinuate that Jacob may have sold information to the robber, but don’t follow up on this after the first interview at all. Still, that’s apparently enough to get Jacob put on indefinite leave. Because having to spend time with his beautiful wife (Olivia Culpo) and dramatically diabetic daughter (Natalia Sophie Butler) is clearly not good enough for him, he begins to obsess about the robbery, starting his own investigation into it and the ones that came before. He also involves his retired police neighbour James (Bruce Willis) in this business, whose help will be rather useful once Jacob actually manages to get much closer to his prey than the police ever do.

Of course, this being the kind of film it is, this also puts Jacob’s family in dire danger.

Bruce Willis does not seem to take his descent into the realms of low budget action cinema about one degree, sometimes two, classier than the one Dolph Lundgren or JCVD cameo their ways through, terribly gracefully. He is usually looking bored and tired in these movies, seldom deigning to do that acting thing he has nominally been hired for, which tends to be enough for the producers of these things as long as they can slap his name on the cover. Digital one-sheet? You know what I mean. Willis clearly is no Cuba Gooding Jr. in his regard, who will approach even a crappy role in a terrible movie with as much seriousness as he can gather (which is good for Gooding Jr., because it doesn’t look like his off-screen behaviour will do him any favours for a future career), nor a Nicolas Cage who will bring as much craziness as is appropriate or more if you ask him to.

So it’s something of a positive surprise that Willis approaches his supporting role in Brian A. Miller’s Reprisal with a comparative degree of enthusiasm. He’s still looking pretty tired but puts enough basic acting moves on display to mandate a friendly nod from this long-time fan. Of course, he is standing next to Frank Grillo who doesn’t shy away from being good in films good, bad or mediocre, cheap or Marvel, even if a film just demands of him to get a bit nervy and obsessed. The film also features a pretty interesting villain performance by Schaech that provides the character with just enough actual human traits he becomes more than just a plot device shooting guns.

The script, as should be obvious by my plot description, doesn’t even try to do anything complex or original with its worn genre tropes, but it is decently paced and structured competently, so the film can move through its clichés unimpeded by awkwardness.

Miller’s direction is appropriately straightforward, with some montage-style intercutting being the most interesting thing he does. Though it is not doing anything artistically interesting, his work is generally competent, apart from a tendency to go too much into the old shaky-cam manoeuvre in the action scenes, in the usual weird assumption that not being able to see properly will read to an audience as being directly in the thick of things. The film’s not too bad about this, fortunately, so there’s at least little danger of headaches for the long-suffering viewer of cheapish action films.


Reprisal is a decently made movie that’s perfectly watchable when one is in the mood for undemanding action in the crime thriller mold, but does let its willing cast down a bit by not providing them with much to get their teeth into.

Three Films Make A Post: You'll float too.

Drifter (2016): I’m not always a fan of too knowing exploitation movie throwbacks, but Chris von Hoffman’s post-apocalyptic (one assumes) cannibal town trip mostly knows when it’s okay to wink and when to be straight. It’s a very low budget affair, so a prospective viewer should adjust accordingly and cope with a script that sometimes drags a bit, dialogue that isn’t always spot on, and other minor flaws of this kind. On the other hand, the film is much better acted than most films in its bracket, is shot with a lot of style and a great feel for making the most out of the available locations (none of which is one of those damn warehouses), and generally gives the impression of a movie made by people who know what they want and what they are doing. It will probably be not quite a new cult classic for anyone, but I came out of it entertained and with respect for the filmmakers.

Wheelman (2017): Speaking of throwbacks, this Netflix production directed by Jeremy Rush certainly is inspired by crime and car based movies of the 70s, though it does look and feel very much like a slick 2010s production, particularly since Rush opts for the not terribly 70s gimmick of shooting most of the film in the car. That technique could have resulted in strained artiness, but in Rush’s hands, it actually feels like a way to let the audience share the tension of a main character (Frank Grillo still very much in what looks and feels like his unexpected career high to me) completely out of his depth in more than one regard. Plus, the director is playful enough even to have a great moment where the car that audience and character(s) share changes, and knows when to move his camera out of the damn thing, so the story – simple as it may be – doesn’t end up overwhelmed by the way it is told. On the writing side, this is very competent and entertaining genre business, not terribly surprising, but made with too much verve for that to matter terribly much.


Bay Coven (1987): This NBC TV movie about a couple of mostly likeable yuppies – Pamela Sue Martin and Tim Matheson – moving to a strange island community that will turn out to have rather problematic traditions (at least if one values one’s life and one’s sanity), was made in a time when supernatural horror wasn’t really the thing to do on TV anymore. Director Carl Schenkel doesn’t seem to care, though, and tells a merry, American Gothic tale of witchcraft, insanity, and a very peculiar kind of marital trouble most couples won’t encounter in their lifetime with a degree of verve. There are quite few effective spooky moments, as well as some entertainingly silly ones, a proper dramatic climax, and even a director and script (by Tim Kring very early in his career) who realize they are also making a film about female anxieties about alienation from one’s partner, and the secrets and lies in a marriage, and make proper use of the possibilities this offers them.

Beyond Skyline (2017)

Warning: I’ll not be able to help myself and spoil all sorts of things this time around!

Remember the eminently forgettable invasion of Los Angeles (which in this sort of film is the world, because who cares about the rest of us, right?) that took place in the decided non-classic Skyline? Well, Beyond Skyline takes place on the eve of that very same invasion, but instead of some hipster yuppies, we follow the adventures of Mark (Frank Grillo), cop on leave with a tragic past. First, he only has to get his son Trent (Jonny Weston) out of custody again, but then the invasion strikes and he needs to go all out fighting for his life and the life of his son, teaming up with subway train driver Audrey (Bojana Novakovic), homeless blind war vet Sarge (Antonio Fargas!) and other people who get killed too early for me to care to keep track of their names.

And that’s just before the really weird stuff happens, which includes misadventures on the alien ship, a team-up with the protagonist of the first Skyline who is basically an ickier Kamen Rider without the motorcycle and the henshin now, and a crash-landing in an Indonesian action flick with Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian and Pamelyn Chee. Apparently, if you really want to fight back an alien invasion, get them to Indonesia.

This is The Purge all over again: just like with that other franchise, a pedestrian, unoriginal and just a bit boring first movie is followed by a sequel that is a box of candy-coloured, internationally minded fun and Frank Grillo.

Now, obviously, Liam O’Donnell’s (who wrote the first Skyline) film won’t impress people looking for an intelligent, incisive alien invasion film, because it is the purest popcorn cinema. If you want to call a film pure that not only uses elements of most of the alien invasion flicks of the last twenty years (without any “they are among us” elements, of course, because that’d need subtlety), and lets them collide with Indonesian style action cinema – while showing the good taste to hire the right actors for that part of the film – but also shows an ever increasing influence by tokusatsu and even has a mecha battle in its finale. That’s before the film’s epilogue which promises space opera for the probably never coming sequel.

I’m not going to pretend O’Donnell creates this Frankenstein monster-like film with taste (well, neither did the good Doctor), but there’s enough panache and sheer fun with cheese, silliness and all the good stuff of cool violence in cinema on the screen to make up for much greater sins. Plus, once Beyond Skyline really gets going, it doesn’t pause for a second anymore, so that a finale – taking place in front of very picturesque Indonesian temple ruins – that features Iko Uwais hacking aliens into pieces, Yayan Ruhian fighting on even when he’s lost an arm (one supposes it was just a scratch), a tiny mass panic and a just as tiny mass battle, a bad piloted organic mecha and a good piloted mecha slugging it out, a chosen child with vague genetic powers (oh, did I not mention the “save the baby” plotline?), and Frank Grillo being nearly as awesome as Uwais, just feels like the logical consequence of what came before. Well, perhaps not logical, but you know what I mean.


Given its comparatively small budget of apparently around 15 million dollars (which as it seems – and alas – it did not pull back, at least in the US), the special effects are pretty fantastic (if you’re okay with bargain basement Giger design, and who wouldn’t be?), as is the action choreography. What really had me grinning with delight for most of the running time, though, was the sheer willingness of the thing to just go there (as well as to Indonesia for the production value and the Uwais star power) and put a lurid, enthusiastic pulp fantasy on display that by all rights should be loved by anyone who loves classic genre movie values.

In short: The Purge: Election Year (2016)

Welcome to the third round of misadventures in a near-future USA ruled by a cabal whose rhetoric sounds a bit too much as if they’d fit right in with the actual near-future president of that particular country. There’s still the yearly Purge Night going on, where said twelve hours see all crime legal, leaving a lot of (mostly poor) people dead. Senator Charlie Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) wants to change that and abolish Purge Night if she becomes president – she even has a change to win the coming election.

In fact, the senator’s chances are so good, the Purge-loving establishment of the New Founding Fathers decides to make good use of the coming Purge Night and get rid of their enemy while acquiring a particularly pleasant human sacrifice for their not-so-secret ceremonies. Fortunately, Roan’s security chief is Leo Barnes (Frank Grillo). You might remember Leo as a rather lethal and effective kind of guy from The Purge: Anarchy, so the senator still has a good chance for survival even when members of her staff betray her.

Roan and Leo end up being chased through the streets by purgers and the mercs hired to kill her alike, but rather sooner than later they find allies in form of corner shop owner Joe (Mykelti Williamson), his employee and friend Marcos (Joseph Julian Soria), and Laney Rucker (Betty Gabriel) who drives an underground triage truck on Purge Nights to make up for the bad shit she once did when she herself went purging.

Clearly, after the somewhat misguided home invasion movie that began it all, the Purge series had found its sweet spot with the near-future action of Anarchy, and writer/director/producer James DeMonaco continues with Election Year in the tone he left off with. So, the third Purge movie again offers blunt politics that suddenly look uncomfortably close to the spirit of the times, street level action in the spirit of Escape from New York, and about half a dozen warmed-up action movie clichés done well enough I don’t particularly mind how often I’ve seen them already.

While the film has some moments of semi-surrealist weirdness – mainly through many a mood-building vignette by the wayside of our protagonists’ path and a finale featuring fascist cultists who aren’t hiding their love for human sacrifices – its action tends to the more earthbound type. While calling it realistic would be absurd, the violence here does not go in for flying people (or cars) or big slow motion fests. As in the last film, DeMonaco is rather effective using this approach, so there’s a pleasant flow of diverse violence committed by a cast whose ethnic make-up puts the film’s money where its mouth is.

As an old leftie, I can’t disagree with the film’s politics much, either, even if it’s the sledgehammer version of a part of leftist thought sold to us by Universal, an irony that should probably bother me more than it actually does.

In short: Demonic (2015)

A handful of young ghost hunters break into a dilapidated old house where a séance once resulted in a bit of demonic possession (I’d say spoiler, but then, this thing is called Demonic) and axe murdering with only one survivor. And hey, one of our young ghost hunters (Dustin Milligan) is the only son of said survivor, so I can’t see what possibly could go wrong here.

The whole she-bang is told in flashbacks that are part of an interview police psychologist Dr Elizabeth Klein (Maria Bello) leads with what might be the lone survivor of the ghost hunters right at the scene of the crime. Why there? Because taking him somewhere else would break the plot. Anyway, terrible secrets, the same old jump scares you have in every James Wan production, and a mildly stupid plot twist follow.

By now, James Wan productions are mostly their own little genre of mainstream horror films, I think. They’re distinguished by generally moody photography, clever lighting, usually decent or better acting, and a complete unwillingness to go outside a very small comfort zone of what a horror movie is supposed to be and to do. So, expect Wan production Demonic (actually directed by one Will Canon) to be slick, expect it to be professional, but also expect it to never do anything unexpected, to never really explore psychological or metaphorical depths or to feature very interesting characters. However, you can expect that jump scare based on a face seen only via camera popping out, that scene with an invisible force dragging a person around, and some lame poppycock about demons that never actually attempts to properly build a mythology around them or make them characters, because this would actually involve using some creative energy instead of genre short hand of the more boring kind.

I wouldn’t exactly call this approach lazy (I’m actually pretty sure the people involved here are putting effort in), but it certainly does result in films that are all pretty much the same, and even though they are certainly slick and professional, they’re not quite slick enough to make me forget how much they lack in creative spirit. I’m nearly tempted to use the word “soulless” here.

Canon’s film does at least mildly mix things up structurally, and in the film’s first hour or so, I found myself quite enjoying the mystery-style approach to the plot, particularly with Maria Bello giving a fine outing as what seems the only competent character in the film. The longer the film went, the clearer it became it wouldn’t use its structure for anything beyond setting up the mandatory boring plot twist. In the final tally, little actually distinguishes this one from half a dozen other Wan-horror films.

This doesn’t mean Demonic is awful. Like nearly all of these films, it’s mildly diverting (or, if you have seen fewer of these films and haven’t seen all of their tricks a dozen times or so, perhaps even mildly exciting), and a perfect film to watch when your brain isn’t up to anything with ambitions beyond being the most generic horror film possible.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,will canon,maria bello,frank grillo

The Purge: Anarchy (2014)

During the night of the yearly purge, when a dystopian USA opens the floodgates to legal murders and mutilation, waitress Eva (Carmen Ejogo), her daughter Cali (Zoë Soul), and the troubled couple Liz (Kiele Sanchez) and Shane (Zach Gilford), all out on the street for no fault of their own, not even stupidity, stumble into the reluctant protection of a nameless stranger (Frank Grillo). The man is armed to the teeth and clearly out to commit an act of personal vengeance yet still can’t help himself and leads these people bound for a violent and most probably highly unpleasant death through the dangerous parts of the city to potential safety; or as much as there is safety for the poor on this particular night.

The problems they encounter are not just poor people doing the rich’s work slaughtering their own, but also a suspiciously well organized group of people who might just be part of a government conspiracy, as well as the idle rich who just love some idle, riskless killing for sport. On the plus side, there’s a resistance group lead by a ranting Michael Kenneth Williams. Omar would be proud, probably.

I was so non-plussed by writer/director James DeMonaco’s original The Purge I didn’t even feel the need to write anything about it. And really, what is there to write about a film that uses an improbable but metaphorically potent dystopian near future concept ideally fit for discussing class war while also featuring acts of entertaining violence to make another home invasion movie about the sanctity of rich peoples’ family life threatened by another bunch of masked young people?

I have some difficulty wrapping my head around the fact the very same James DeMonaco made this much more interesting, as well as just better, near future SF action film taking place in the same world and talking about all the things the first Purge completely ignored. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as happy about it as can be, for what is more pleasant to watch than a filmmaker learning from his mistakes and improving on them? So, unlike the first one, we now have a film that talks a lot about class divisions in various ways, some of them more subtle – best represented by the way characters in the film rather subtly react to the concept of the Purge in ways quite connected to their ability to buy ways to protect themselves during it – some of them in a kind of sledgehammer agitprop way Roger Corman would have very much approved of in the 70s. For the latter, just look at the way the film turns the really rich into grotesques that look like a different species altogether, held together by botox and some of the most frightening partings hair science has ever encountered. There’s room for the middle ground of a degree of complexity too, for Anarchy also finds time to argue the worst trick the rich (faceless, evil mass that they are in this argument until one of them does something actually human right at the end of the movie) ever played on the poor was making them fight against each other for scraps. It’s not the deepest political analysis, but in the sequel of a film that just ignored the obvious political implications of its set-up completely it’s an extreme improvement.

I’d also argue this Purge provides a much clearer idea of the feelings that come with the concept of class when you actually belong to the so-called lower classes, have to scrabble for the things the rich deign to give you, and buckle and say thank you for stuff that should be everyone’s birthright while your so-called superiors turn themselves into grotesques that can’t even move their faces anymore for the money that could feed and make comfortable everyone you know for years, than a more subtly argued approach could. And let me tell you, those feelings just might have more to do with those of ranting Michael Kenneth Williams than with more pleasant and peaceful ones.

At the same time, Anarchy isn’t so angry it thinks that personal vengeance, be it as well founded as it may, is a thing that’ll keep a human being whole in the long run, so it treats personal vengeance as a thing to get over, just another trap that’ll only distract someone from the larger political picture as well as from something just as important – one’s own humanity.

All this – and it’s really a lot – DeMonaco packages in a delightful series of suspense and action scenes directed with tension, clarity, and style, drenched in nightly neon colours, clearly reminding of the post-apocalyptic and kind-of-post-apocalyptic films of John Carpenter and Walter Hill. Anarchy particularly reminded me of the best films of the latter director, with The Warriors as a film I’d really be surprised DeMonaco hadn’t seen quite often - a compliment if ever I made one.

So, to summarize, The Purge: Anarchy has all the virtues of a classic low budget movie: it’s clever, political, subversive, grotesque and just a whole lot of fun to watch if you enjoy bloody violence, scripts that mix the outrageous with the clever with human bits, and an acting ensemble that knows how to let short-hand characters breathe.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,sf,action,james demonaco,frank grillo,carmen ejogo,zoë soul