'Purge' leaves audience disgusted

I really want to use a cliché pun on the title of “The Purge” to describe exactly what I wanted to do after watching this miserable excuse for a horror movie.

But I won’t because that may be too offensive to print.

Regardless of how you spin it, “The Purge” is without a doubt one of the worst horror movies released in the past year. And that really does say quite a bit, considering the horror genre has been slacking horrendously for the past decade. Or two decades.

Finding a good horror movies these days is like finding a diamond in a rock pile. “The Purge,” though, is not one of those movies.

Before I delve into all the reasons why  “The Purge” is so awful, I’ll explain why it’s not.

“The Purge” does, in fact, try to mix it up a little bit. The formula strays from the classic stranger-in-the-house plotline.

The concept of the film has some potential.

It shows us an interesting, albeit terrifyingly unrealistic, dystopian United States where for one night a year, all crime is legal and citizens go on murder rampages to “purge” themselves of the hatred and aggression they build up during the year.

This supposedly keeps the economy up and the crime rate for the rest of the year down.

However, the execution of this idea is absolutely, completely amateur.

We follow the story of the Sandin family dealing with the night of the Purge in the year 2022 (which, by the way, looks exactly like the year 2013) as they face multiple threats to the home they thought was safe.

Mediocre acting, atrocious writing that reminds me of something I would write in the sixth grade and one of the worst endings I’ve ever seen in a movie — the theater burst out into laughter — make up for one pretty bad movie.

The scares are mild and far apart.

The only way the movie got me even moderately frightened was by using creepy masks, one of the cheapest tricks in the book.

“The Purge” only really flows when it’s at its quick-moving parts. The slow parts of the movie are a dead crawl. It tries to set up moral dilemmas, which, granted, is a welcome deviation from the average horror, but they don’t work when you kind of hate every character in the film and aren’t really rooting for anyone.

It seems mean-spirited and is littered with racist undertones that make it even more dislikable than it already is.

I love the horror/suspense genre, and like the hopeless romantic that I am I’ll continue to go to the movies to see the newest flick, even though I know I’ll probably leave the cinema disappointed.

“The Purge” did nothing to end my disappointment.