Favorite films
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
Don’t forget to select your favorite films!
The Forever Purge is an actual Western and not just a collection of Western tropes. The film is John Carpenter-esque, of course, but also calls to mind John Ford, right down to the muddled (and sometimes contradictory) politics and the fixation on community. Yet here the Stagecoach is a 18-wheeler cab and the savages are the purgers, the products of a centuries-spanning binge on settler colonialist ideology.
First-person shooter. Found-footage horror. The french drone narration compliments the churn of snuff-films, tedious surveillance, and test footage, along with a brilliant end sequence that drops us in a serene desert somewhere in the American West.
"The more the pilots can see, the more mistakes they make.
This is how we make war."
I'd probably change my mind if I watched them all again, but I'm going to call this one my current favorite out of all the Ranown westerns.
My full scorecard:
1. Decision at Sundown
2. Commanche Station
3. Ride Lonesome
4. Seven Men from Now
5. The Tall T
6. Buchanan Rides Alone
. . . but they're all great.