#THE FIRST PURGE MOVIE#
#THE FIRST PURGE SERIES#

If they do participate, they get to wear a special pair of contact lenses that will record their actions the contacts glow in the dark, of course, making everybody look scary as shit.Īmong our heroes, Nya (Lex Scott Davis) is an activist protesting this insane experiment, while her ex-boyfriend Dmitri (Y’lan Noel) is a local drug dealer who also hates the idea but is determined to stick it through with his cronies, because moving his supply out of Staten Island would be too risky. The people of Staten Island are skeptical, but they’re also being offered $5,000 each to remain in the borough during “the experiment,” and even more money if they participate in the night’s activities. Updale (Marisa Tomei), will have the desired effects of renewing the American ideal and mollifying unrest. This time, we jump back a few years in the chronology to see the original Purge Night, presented as a social experiment confined solely to Staten Island, with the eyes of the entire nation watching to see if the program’s promise of “societal catharsis,” as articulated by sociologist Dr. The new film delivers a jolt of energy to this franchise - much needed after the tired and awkward The Purge: Election Year, which at the time felt like the idea had run its course.

#THE FIRST PURGE SERIES#

(It’s also the only entry in the series where the heroes are entirely people of color.) As a result, there’s an urgency and an anger this time around that helps paper over some of the story’s messiness, as well as some of the drama of trying to explain where this whole crazy Purge idea actually came from. So it makes sense that The First Purge is the least subtle one yet, and the one most focused on race. At each step, like any good grind house showman, DeMonaco seemed to modify the idea a little bit, making it fit the issues of the day. In so doing, it gave us a compellingly sleazy look at how the capacity for violence infects us all, while also offering up a toxic tasting menu of American psychoses: class war, racism, sexual deviancy, gun worship, religious nuttery. 2014’s The Purge: Anarchy, still the best of the lot, descended into the streets to show us what Purge Night really looked like. The original Purge (dammit, we can’t say “the first Purge” anymore) was essentially a home invasion film with a Twilight Zone–style twist.

Oh, and some of these bad guys speak Russian, too.Įver since The Purge premiered in 2013, with its unusually rich and prescient concept of a future-state America where all crime is legal for an annual twelve-hour period, series writer-director James DeMonaco (who scripted The First Purge but handed off directing duties this time to Gerard McMurray) has been expanding and tweaking the idea. Now, The First Purge - a prequel though it may be - takes things even further, giving us armed gangs of psychos dressed in Klan robes and Nazi overcoats and cop uniforms and (of course) white supremacist khakis, all descending on poor neighborhoods hoping to kill as many black and Hispanic people as they can. Released in the summer of 2016 to a nation only beginning to grasp how utterly doomed it was, The Purge: Election Year, the third entry in the series, gave us the spectacle of a bunch of pasty, bloodthirsty male politicians desperately trying to cling to power by trying to destroy a progressive female presidential candidate.

#THE FIRST PURGE MOVIE#

Man, and you thought the last Purge movie was blunt. Everything’s going super, why do you ask? Universal Pictures

The first purge