31 Days of Horror: The Forever Purge (2021)

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31 Days of Horror is the theme that I’ve consistently been good at. I typically try to write about one horror movie every day during October. With all my other themes, I’m lucky to talk about more than a handful of films in the month, but I usually nail my horror month.

Obviously, that hasn’t been the case this month. I’ve just been busy, I guess. And I had gotten out of the habit of writing about movies like that. Or something. Actually, I’ve had a lot of other writing duties to attend to. I’ve had a lot of movies to watch for Cinema Sentries, most of which haven’t been horror films.

I’m now in the middle of watching the Nightmare on Elm Street series, and I will write about that, but since I will be reviewing the entire set, I don’t feel like talking about each movie (except last week when I made the first film my Friday Night Horror movie, and possibly this coming Friday when I may do the same for one of the later films.)

So here we are. I’ve now seen four films in the Purge franchise, and frankly I’ve not loved any of them (you can read my review of the first three here). I unintentionally skipped the fourth film in the series, The First Purge (2018), and landed on this one, the fifth in the series.

At the end of The Purge: Election Year, a new President was elected who promised to end the annual Purges for good. Well, naturally this sequel isn’t going to be set in a land without Purges, so it begins some eight years later with it being reinstated. And as the title suggests, some really committed racist assholes decide that one 12 hour period in which all crime (including murder) is allowed just isn’t enough. The Purge needs to last forever. Or at least until they can get rid of everyone that doesn’t look like them.

The undertone of the entire series is that The Purge was created by rich white supremacists, and so this film isn’t exactly coming up with a new idea. But there are a few interesting things to be found.

We begin on a Texas ranch that hires a number of Mexican immigrants. The owner of the place (played by Will Patton – always great) is a decent dude. He treats his workers well. He even gives them money on Purge night so they can buy some protection (though he does not offer to let them stay on his fortified compound.) Apparently, there are places where those who are not rich and white can find shelter for Purge night (for a price). That’s an interesting idea.

Purge Night goes by pretty smoothly, but then morning comes and they are still Purging. Our Mexican heroes head back to the ranch and wind up teaming up with the rich white guys that run it. One of them is the type of racist who doesn’t think he’s racist, but just thinks that everybody “ought to stick with their own kind.” Naturally, he’ll learn the error of his ways by film’s end.

Our heroes load into a semi-truck and head to the border. The film seems to think it is really clever by having a group of rich white dudes try to cross into Mexico for safety. The film is not all that clever in any of its parts. But it is more or less thrilling. The action scenes are well staged and I was entertained. That’s really all I need from these films at this point.

Now Watching: No Way Out (1987)

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No Way Out (1987)
Directed by: Roger Donaldson
Starring: Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, Will Patton

Synopsis: Navy Lt. Tom Farrell meets a young woman, Susan Atwell, and they share a passionate fling. Farrell then finds out that his superior, Defense Secretary David Brice, is also romantically involved with Atwell. When the young woman turns up dead, Farrell is put in charge of the murder investigation. He begins to uncover shocking clues about the case, but when details of his encounter with Susan surface, he becomes a suspect as well.

Rating: 8/10

My little experiment to get more readers was a total bust. Turns out I’m terrible at posting regularly. I just don’t have it in me to be that guy, and the little extra I did post saw no improvement in my numbers.

Maybe they would if I pushed a little harder and did it for a little longer. I don’t know. I don’t really care. I’ll spend some more time thinking about what comes next. It seems logical to do more reviewing on Letterboxed or writing for Cinema Sentries, as that would definitely get me more eyeballs. But I love this little site, and it is hard to let that go. So, I’m gonna write when I want to write, post when I want to post. If people read it, great, and if not, well, that’s their loss.

Based on the novel The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing (which was also the basis of a pretty terrific little film noir of the same name made in 1948), No Way Out turns it into a political thriller with some neo-noir/erotic thriller tendencies.

Kevin Costner and Sean Young’s scenes together are steamy and playful, and you think the film is going to go one way, and then it goes another. Once she is out of the picture, it turns from its noir background to more of a straightforward thriller. There are a surprising number of scenes of just Costner walking angrily about the Pentagon, trying to keep everyone from knowing that the man they are looking for is actually him. And it totally works.

Hackman’s character has a lot more nuance than these things usually allow, making Will Patton’s lackey to Hackman’s Secretary of Defense character the true villain.

There are a couple of good chase scenes, and a lot of ridiculous techno nonsense (a large part of the plot revolves around them taking a nearly destroyed Polaroid photo negative and using computers to slowly render it into a readable image). The actors are all good, and I found it quite thrilling.

Murder Mysteries in May: In the Deep Woods (1992)

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The thing about finding movies on the internet to watch is that you don’t always know where the movies came from. I mean there are the usual bad rips, or hardcoded subtitles, or the audio is the wrong language type of thing to deal with, but what I’m talking about is not necessarily knowing what kind of movie you’re about to watch. Is this a prestige Hollywood movie, or some straight-to-video release? Did it have a sizeable budget or were they working on a shoestring? It if has named actors, at what point in their career was this movie made? Were they famous when they made it?

Obviously, for a lot of movies, this is almost automatically known by me. I watch a lot of movies, I pay attention to movie reviews and news. In the vast majority of the films I watch I have some idea of what I’m getting into.

But not always.

Sometimes it is a surprise. Case in point: In the Deep Woods stars Rosanne Arquette, Anthony Perkins, Will Patton, and Amy Ryan. These are people I know. These are people I like. Those last two might not be household names, but I bet you’ve seen them in something. But Arquette and Perkins were stars.

It was made in 1992 which is a little late in Perkins’s career (in fact this was his last film) and a little early for Ryan (in fact this was her first film), but Will Patton had established himself as a solid character actor and Arquette was at the height of her powers.

Not that I was paying that much attention to the date of release when I picked this movie, I saw those names and some decent reviews on Letterboxd and pressed “play.”

What I didn’t realize is that this was a made-for-TV movie. Made for NBC in 1992. TV is different now. TV gets big budgets, big movie stars, and big prestige. In 1992 movies made for broadcast television were usually pretty lame.

Oh well, live and learn, and all that.

Arquette plays Joanna Warren a children’s book author. There is a serial killer on the loose who is dragging women into the woods, I mean The Deep Woods, and doing terrible things to them. Joanna might be his next victim (well, probably not his next victim because that would build our climax a little too quickly, but it is a safe bet he’ll go after her in the last act.

Perkins is the creepy old dude who might be a private investigator who might have some sort of relationship with one of the victims. He might have been hired by her parents. He lies a lot. The film plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Patton plays the police detective assigned to the case. He keeps creeping on Joanna, asking her out on dates even though she repeatedly turns him down. The film periodically plays up his potential to be the actual killer.

Amy Ryan is Joanna’s sister, I think, or maybe just a friend. Her husband gets a little play as the potential killer, but mostly she’s just a gal pal Joanna can talk to amongst all the creepy dudes.

My favorite part of the film is that the killer is supposedly some kind of mastermind. He’s brutally killing these girls but leaving no clues, no fingerprints or DNA and there are definitely no witnesses. And yet the film continually shows us his crimes (well shows us as much as a TV movie from the early 1990s was allowed to show us) and it is often in daylight, and in public. One time we see him grab a girl in a busy parking lot. Two seconds before he grabs the lady we see extras walking around. Yet no witnesses.

This is a dumb movie. There are a few noir/Giallo touches that are nice, and Perkins is enjoyable – I mean his character is ridiculous, constantly obfuscating his motives for no reason – but he’s enjoyable to watch.

But watching it got me to thinking about made-for-TV movies from this era. This was before prestige TV. This was when television was considered a lesser medium than cinema. This was before streaming. Thirty-minute sitcoms and hour-long dramas ruled television. Now again they’d make a mini-series or a feature-length movie to show on a Monday night. Sometimes they’d get real celebrities to star in them. Their budgets were usually small and they tended to cater to the biggest possible audience. A serial killer movie fits that bill.

Thinking about In the Deep Woods in that context. Had I watched it at a time when there weren’t a thousand awesome shows in my queue and when I often watched whatever happened to be on. I might not have hated it. It would still be a long way from good, but I bet I’d enjoyed myself.