Hello all, and welcome to a new segment here at Horror Writers: Trailer Talk!
From time-to-time, one of us will pick a trailer and wax poetic about it for a while. (This is something I did a couple times at my blog and had a lot of fun with it, so I thought I’d revive it here and open it up for the entire Horror Writers family to join in on.) For the time being, we’ll be focusing on new trailers. We’ll be on the lookout for anything, regardless of the size of the budget. If you have a trailer you’d like us to look at, just get in contact with us and we’ll try to feature it here. We love to talk about trailers, and we also love to help promote indie filmmakers whenever we can.
Today’s trailer will be The Purge: Anarchy
I wasn’t a fan of the first Purge, mainly because we spent the majority of the movie in the house of a family who was completely unlikable. “There’s a huge world out there with terrible things happening,” I said. “Why do we need to spend the movie with one family?”
The easy answer to that is, “The budget is too small,” but my brain doesn’t like answers like that. I got a taste of the country-wide murder-party in the opening credits, and my bloodlust was not sated with a below-average home invasion movie. I wanted more. I wanted to see how the rest of the country dealt with the annual purge.
It looks as though I’ll finally get my wish. I’m not overly excited about this, but I have a feeling it’ll be more interesting than the first one. Mainly because they have the budget to show a little more of the country in this one.
I love the opening. Seeing this in the theater, I would have no idea that it would be a trailer for the new Purge movie. Hearing the Neon Trees’ “Animal” blaring from a car stereo doesn’t scream “IMPENDING MAYHEM” to me.
It looks like we’ll be following a married couple, stuck in the middle of the city during the purge. Let this be a lesson to the people of the future: if there’s a 12 hour span every year where you can be gutted in the streets with no repercussions, make sure you can get home in time. And get a tune-up on your car.
But they didn’t do those things. So they’re stuck in a Judgment Night situation, but with no Dennis Leary (probably) and legal murder. (These people are so stupid.)
I say we’ll see more of the city than we did in the first one, which appears to be true. But, in watching this trailer, it’s difficult to know exactly how much of the city we’ll see. I’m guessing we’ll just see a few blocks. I’d love to see a bigger view of the purge, but I doubt that’s happening here. It’s still going to be extremely limited. Which I suppose is fine: if they keep making money on these, they can just keep rolling with the series and show a little more every time. Although I really don’t know how much interest I have in watching a dozen of these movies. (Who am I kidding? I’ll watch every single one of them.)
The trailer closes with “America The Beautiful” (as did the trailer for the first movie), and a masked man (with “God” written on his mask) waving at the camera. That really annoyed me. Showing a masked man wave slowly seems like a really easy way to make something seem creepy, but it just seemed like it was trying too hard here. “People wear masks. It’s creepy. See how creepy it is? He’s tilting his head. It says ‘God’ on his mask. Isn’t that subversive? Creepy and subversive. Money please!”
I don’t have high hopes for this movie. It should be better than the first (which isn’t too hard), but I don’t think it’s going to be very good. Maybe I’ll try to catch a matinee, but I’ll probably just wait until it hits DVD.