Last Year's Masks: THE PURGE, THOR: THE DARK WORLD + ABSENTIA

Mainstream movies have become mash-ups now, their big budgets making an original thought too risky to have except in the abstract. So THE PURGE is HUNGER GAMES meets FUNNY GAMES divided by LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT + HOSTEL, telling a grim tale of a dystopian future that uses a mischief night-style no rules (no cops) bloody free-for-all as an excuse for wiping out the homeless, bringing population levels under control, boosting sales of home security systems, settling old grudges and/or hunting 'the most dangerous game.' It shares HOSTEL's grim nihilistic world view that all humans are really homicidal sadists at heart, and only the rich liberals get to sit it out behind steel shutters. So far so good, but like so many good premises before it, PURGE never dares to side with the violent. It has to all boil down to a rich white noble yuppie family with a poor sweaty black man duct taped to a chair, which then leads to moralistic hand-wringing as to whether surrender him to the masked yuppie marauders outside, who crave a chance for EYES WIDE SHUT-style maskies and lashings (even the idea they need to wear masks at all is confusing to the film's premise). This explains why this black dude was in their tony neighborhood but rather than just ride off in search of other prey the masked kids lay siege to the house, wasting hours wandering around outside like a mix of Whit Stillman preppies and the British drunks in STRAW DOGS. And finally you're like oh brother, can't we FF to the final bloodletting? (We did).

In other words, despite a novel premise it feels it has nothing to do, so just falls back on trite civics lessons. Of course the wife is a hot, willowy thing (Leana Headey) in perfectly-fitting white slacks that compliment her big round burgundy wine glass and of course the dad is Ethan Hawke, and they have a nerdy kid who likes to build robot cameras and whose naive hippie idiocy gets them in the predicament in the first place. There are nice touches like people putting blue flowers on their porches, the use of 'tick-tock momentum,' but the shots of masked figures standing silently in the dark backgrounds seem lifted from Carpenter and THE STRANGERS (without actually picking up on what made them effective) and the plot's over-reliance on Voight-Kampf empathy test double fake-out machina climaxery is groan-inducing. FEAR tread a similar climactic territory and bravely stepped outside itself and that movie was ten times better for the presence of Mark Wahlberg playing up the animus core of the sexual anxiety dread of it all. That film was bright enough to realize the villain needs to be the star. He only gets one night a year to make it work, and so this one night he's the fucking star not you Ethan!!

And that's the kind of animus dread the film needs. If, for example, one of the liberal family members had been all keen to do some killing of their own, there might be some countercurrents to the lefty posturing; the only character I found myself respecting was the main villain played with eerie grace by Rhys Wakefield (he's Australian, no surprise considering his Heath Ledger-ish psycho flair) and he's shut out of the house for most of the film. The idea that Hawke could outslug him in the finale is offensive.

Like so many 'weaker' versions of this story, THE PURGE confuses 'true' morality with hippie do-goodism. Ethan Hawke and writer-director James DeMonaco are trying to make an EL DORADO to go with their RIO BRAVO, which was their ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 remake. Dude, you ain't never gonna touch the Carpenter, which means no Hawks neither! Carpenter's 1978 original ASSAULT was made on no money but oh, that awesome electronic score, and the realization of true morality, which is a code expressed between people via cigarettes and dwindling shell supplies not finger-wagging and hand-wringing. Dududadah DUHdududadah Dududdadah DaDududaha.

THE PURGE has earned $64 million so far and cost but three, and so a sequel is naturally in the works. The only reason I even rented it was I'd gotten it mixed up with YOU'RE NEXT, but I didn't even like it when it was called THE STRANGERS (see "A Couple of Bagheads") and that's why you never let a stranger in your house, without first looking him up on imdb.

Then there's the thing with the new THOR movie, THE DARK WORLD (2013). I was excited to see Natalie Portman again as she and Chris Hemsworth had great chemistry in the first film, but now both seem coated in a CGI airbrushed patina and a veil of hangover, leaving their romantic sparks to the editor's trash folder and leaving Kat Dennings to supply all the human complexity and witty patter. She steals all her scenes, Bunnier than the CGI teams can catch, and thank god because otherwise this THOR would be as cold as a RESIDENT EVIL anteroom. The other saving grace in DARK is the complex arc of fraternal bonding and jealousy between trickster archetype Loki (Tom Hiddleston, all Sex Pistol elegance and complex eyes) and Thor who lacks a lot of the Valhalla resonance he had under Kenneth Branagh's wing in the first installment, though Hemsworth does wakes up in their big moments together.

Alas, Dennings and Hiddleston aren't around nearly enough and a lot of the rest seems coasting on fumes. One of the things that makes Marvel movies great is they don't open up with long elaborate prefaces about far-away armies battling the forces of darkness like we're supposed to be instantly invested in all the distant carnage. That's the kind of thing Uwe Boll or George Lucas or Paul W.S. Anderson do, not Marvel.

 I'm not blaming anyone --acting in all that blue screen must be like wading through a swamp to try and get at any real characterization. In the first film (it made my top ten!), director Kenneth Branagh kept the Shakespeare underpinnings alive and resonant below the manly muscles and CGI, but two dudes; Alan Taylor and James Gunn direct this one and together they bury those underpinnings deeper than even the zombie bard himself could reach.

I'll confess I've been a big fan of these Marvel films overall: they reward multiple viewings and never take themselves too seriously (unlike DC's Batmen and Supermen with their confusion over true moral codes vs. tweedy liberal lecturing). Marvel scripts are often things of beauty, boiling vast prequels of exposition down to a few droll quips and no one is all the way hero or villain - the good guys have flaws: narcissism, drinking, insecurity, anger issues, passive aggressive relationship avoidance, and the bad guys have soft spots, stray rays of compassion, and charisma. That said, THOR: THE DARK WORLD lapses at times into DC self-importance and oh man those bad guys, the whole aesthetic of the 'Dark Elves' looks too familiar, like the filmmakers had never seen anything other than fantasy franchises. These 'elves' drive vertical tie-fighters and look like Orc Klingon Mordor Palpatine Voldemorts, with albino ponytails and masks that make them welcome during THE PURGE. Asgard looks so much like the Emerald City or Mongo in the 1980 FLASH GORDON that when it's zippy force field goes up you just know shit must be intentional. 

From top: Emerald City, Asgard, Mongo

These "Dark Elves" only have one saving grace: their total devotion to wiping out all life in all seven dimensions, a noble pursuit reminding me a lot of how I feel when I'm super cranky and hung over and trying to take a nap while kids scream outside my window and trucks back up beep beep beep beep and car alarms go off all up and down 7th Avenue for no reason. Oh to know that some power might just shut it all down, forever. But then of course, it goes away. And unless you really make that clear, why bother? The motivation for wanting eternal darkness has to be something we can understand, why should we consider these elves anything other than pixels. Branagh let whole scenes unfold in the first film, the men went out drinking, for example, SHIELD got in everyone's way trying to understand and control what was going on. Here we understand less than SHIELD did in the first film, but at least they cared. Where are they now? ABC keeps them too busy?

There is a great finale, which involves a big battle that rages across numerous dimensions and planets via holes in the aligned realms, wherein gravity disappears or fluctuates --and all the ancient monuments turn out to have been built during this same alignment to point the way to when it would happen again! Dude, that's some ancient alien shit, explaining how all these megalithic stones were moved without electricity, but they gloss right over it. Onto the big finale! It's rushed and too pleased with its CGI landscapes and steampunk landing gears and red glowing forge grenades but the final seven plane battle was so tight that I was, for a moment, brought giddily back to the Jack Kirby-drawn and Stan Lee-scripted brain-melters of the Silver Age. And even bad Marvel is better than most shit these days. They can't all be directed by Joss Whedon, Bryan Singer or J.J. Abrams.

Another Green World: from top: Prometheus, Dark World, Potter, Absentia

Speaking of dark worlds, ABSENTIA (2010): Katie Parker and Courtney Bell are two sisters, one of whom is pregnant in the process of declaring her husband dead after seven long years in the titular legal limbo; the younger one (Parker) comes to help with the pregnancy, this after some trouble with drugs and now she's allegedly clean. She jogs in the morning and goes through a mysterious tunnel that recalls Billy Goats Gruff in her mind. Turns out, well, I shan't spoil it, but the movie gets the lack of visible monster right, so the terror comes from the anxiety of not knowing entirely what we're dealing with. I saw it alone on Saturday as it just happened to be on  Showtime while I was writing the first part of this post, and just listening to the great rapport between the sisters lured me in. I was alone and it was getting dark faster than I was prepared for, and the film ingeniously taps into the fear of both, for me, the way only BLAIR WITCH has done before.

There is a certain type of person who sees a ghost and thinks they saw a ghost and there's a type of person who, like me, sees a ghost and figures he's hallucinating. I might have seen a dozen real ghosts by now and just cited flashbacks and/or a bad flu or lack of sleep or too much of it, and this idea is well-used in ABSENTIA: this girl's therapist has her believing that seeing her missing husband everywhere is just a sign of stress, borne of waiting out the necessary seven years in the missing person file before he can be declared legally dead. So even though we see him, and see her seeing him, she pretends not to (she doesn't see us seeing him, alas). Meanwhile, maybe there's some interdimensional portal that troll insect monsters are coming through and abducting humans but the cops can't write that up in their report, so you must be on drugs... again!

The fear of the unknown plus the sisterly rapport missing from most interactions in DARK WORLDS or THE PURGE or any other 'unknown'-courting film combine to deliver a slow simmer anxiety and Parker has this great ease with her body language and slow dawning beauty --you barely notice her at first and then suddenly wham, you're in love with her. ABSENTIA is the same way. It doesn't really ape any horror movie that came before it, so it may help to start watching it while writing this post. The small human scale, naturalistic low-key lighting, solid actorly rapport, a trap story that snaps shut behind you, trips to lawyer offices that underscore the legal system's inability to protect the present from the darkness, and a vaguely ominous two-chord score make the less-is-more argument so intensely it gave me a chill right down to the bone.

 I was so unnerved after the end, in fact, that I had to race to pop in my always-nearby DVD of the 1957 classic, THE BEGINNING OF THE END, to get some feeling of closure. Nothing says you're safe and sound quite like watching Peter Graves shoot a machine gun at rear-projected grasshopper. In 50's monster movies, at least, seeing is never the same as believing, and thank god.