American Nightmare 4 : Les origines

I find this film to be very underrated and it may be due to the fact that it features more blacks than whites, which I personally don't mind. I like The Purge franchise and making a prequel was a decent idea, I liked how everything actually started. Although with more capable filmmakers it could have been more imaginative and intelligent for sure, but this is all about action and entertainment and in that realm the film delivers. The chaos in the streets is perhaps even crazier than before, the blood is not spared, the masks are once again great, the main character and her brother are likeable, and not many people can make a hero out of a drug dealer – you root for him in the finale. The final action purge in the apartment block is like something out of Terminator, but I liked it very much. A nice surprise. 75%. (19/09/2018)

For a while, I was hoping that the creators were just kidding. Unfortunately, they were serious. The most suffering ethnic group after Jews got on NFFA's radar, and the film went south for me. Not only because I couldn’t care less about the relationship between black and white Americans, since my family never owned a plantation in Dixieland, but mainly because the screenplay was worth dog shit. Rambo was better with Stallone. The whole film sucked up to the black community so much that I had an urge to start rapping and hang a portrait of Martin Luther King on my wall. (30/12/2018)

The American film The First Purge primarily consists of the need to add some background information to a series we started watching when the purge already existed. At times I had the feeling that what happened during the first purge was more recent than what happened in the subsequent purges, but continuity is not always perfectly preserved in this style of filmmaking (where the origin is filmed as the fourth episode). As an action horror film, however, the film works well enough. (13/02/2019)