The Purge Full Series Retrospective | A Comical Look at American Dystopia
The Purge is a series that has been flailing about, surviving on the typical Blumhouse strategy of low budgets on safe bets for years, but differs from the typical Blumhouse picture in being comically high-concept. The breakout hit for Blumhouse was Paranormal Activity, a microbudget horror movie that consists largely of pots falling off shelves, marketed so well that two hundred thousand became 20 million for audiences of teenagers who needed a place to make out without mom coming in. Since Paranormal Activity they’ve largely stayed in similar lanes, with franchises like Insidious, Sinister, Ouija, Unfriended, the Facebook ghost movie, but not the other Facebook ghost movie, because there are two, M3gan, and the evil teddy bear movie, but they also have a long running, micro-budget, high concept action, horror, home invasion, sci-fi, speculative fiction, political allegory genre fusion franchise that chugs along off a concept people take the bait on. These movies started as dumb political allegories, and have only gotten more brazen, silly, and, frankly, exploitational, and will very likely have their last hurrah this year, as with orange man bad running for office one last time, it’s safe to say this franchise will peter out for good unless something drastic changes in how these movies are designed, and I’m gonna cash in hard on it. The Purge series is dragged around on a concept so insane and convoluted that I will have to consistently come back in order to point out that the concept is so poorly thought out that every movie in this series has to jump through hoops to even appear sensible- in the near future of 2014 [Harvey Birdman Clip] the economy collapses, and the totalitarian New Founding Fathers of America take over, despite the fact that the country is in no way run as a totalitarian state, and in the distant future of 2017 [Harvey Birdman Clip] they enact The Purge, an annual 12 hour overnight jamboree where all crime is legal, which successfully gets unemployment down to 1% and revitalizes the economy. There are only a few stipulations, no explosives, because they would be too expensive to film, certain government officials, like the president can not be killed, and uh, that’s it- I have no idea how these rules are enforced, because uh, police and fire department do not operate during The Purge, and despite ALL crime being legal, the only one people seem to be interested in is murder. Nobody ever takes a plane and crashes it into a building, nobody buys a gun with a bump stock, and perhaps most fascinatingly, nobody commits major theft or financial crime- you could walk into a bank, take a million dollars, and nobody could stop you, the economy would be in shambles, complete chaos, but it never occurs to anyone. Instead, everyone goes straight for killing, and oh boy, they try hard to justify this one, but we’ll get to that. The premise is terrible, needlessly high concept, for a silly reason, we’ll get to that, and if you can get through one of these movies without a nagging feeling that it’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever seen, you may want to get checked for a concussion. I haven’t even started talking about the movies yet
Intro - (00:00)
The Purge - (03:14)
The Purge: Anarchy - (10:03)
The Purge: Election Year - (14:10)
The First Purge - (19:49)
The Purge (Season 1) - (24:45)
The Purge (Season 2) - (30:41)
The Forever Purge - (36:06)
Conclusion - (40:34)
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