Best Feature Film / Best Cinematography at the 2023 Los Angeles Cinematography Film Festival, Best 1st Time Director of a Feature Film at the Best Actor & Director Awards, and Best Feature Under $250,000 at the 2023 International New York Film Festival
On the one hand, POPULATION PURGE – available on digital platforms Goggle Play, Amazon and Microsoft as of July 9 – sashays like a zany, grim-grisly-action-horror-thriller with a Halloween-ish varnish.
On the other hand, POPULATION PURGE is an audacious subversive crafting of derring-do filmmaking sneering at contemporary America poised to fall into the abyss of apocalyptic doom thanks to 2024 Donald Trump Campaigning with SCOTUS unethicalness in tow.
The swashbuckling between PP sashaying ying and PP sneering yang may jolt some audience members like it did this reviewer into an almost kaleidoscopic-transcendent-cinematic state of mind.
Admittedly, even though this reviewer who could easily imagine POPULATION PURGE a five-star, slam dunk rating, there are problems and what look like problems. Those are to be expected of filmmakers who dare to think outside the box of normal filmmaking as they create their own platform for making films.
The plot, for example, seems to careen all over the map. Some audiences will get upset at what looks like sheer lunacy. Others will feel they have somehow been tuned into the essence of creative genius at work, and if they can just hang in there, like this reviewer did, and watch POPULATION PURGE more than once, as this reviewer did, they will be awarded for their patience as they discover more.
POPULATION PURGE Bric-A-Bracs
Onslow the Warden, played by S. Lamar Wilson
– Lots of martial arts scenes: Some good, some bad, some audaciously slapstick.
– Film could use some editing. But on the other hand, the overall look of the film may be exactly what the filmmakers wanted. Some sequences are exquisitely shot, and others should have hit the cutting room floor.
– The slicing and dicing, cutting, impaling and stabbing, and so on and so forth: The filmmakers obviously took the edge off many of what could have been, and in other movies that come to mind, were gruesome, that is, gruesome spelled with a Capital G.
“If a member of our family is being purged, we ask that you remain in our bereavement room until called. The government mental purge is painless and the entire process will only last a few minutes.”
POPULATION PURGE Synopsis
The U.S. government, concerned about the problems of immigration, global warming and other ills, commences a depopulation program to deliberately poison millions of Americans and residents. An octogenarian granddaddy – an eccentric thespian, to say the least, who dresses in Halloween getup and wields a shotgun as he stands his ground, and his GenZ-ish grand-daughter pissed off that she’s missing out on life are immune to the poison.
The mother of all granddaddies? He sure thinks so.
Maya, played by Lyndsey Soto
She wields a bow and arrow that would have Robin Hood in awe. Together, they resort to guerilla warfare to stay alive as they are hunted down by blood-draining scalpers, bounty hunters and a vicious government official hellbent on saving his son: They want their blood.
The first 60 minutes or so of the 89-minute POPULATION PURGE is more coherent than the remaining 29 minutes or so – but not giving the 29 minutes its due is not a good idea. In a dystopian world with a radical government unleashing a deadly poison to control population, only those with blood type AB positive remain unscathed.
The rest of the population suffers chronic illnesses, causing widespread chaos, panic and violent insurrection. “As the majority slowly succumbs to the effects of the poison, their only hope lies in receiving transfusions of AB positive blood from the few immune survivors, like Charlie and his granddaughter Maya.”
Living in the hellhole of what remains of an abandoned amusement park, Charlie is a renegade supplier of blood to the underground market. But the sanctuary is threatened by the fascistic rule of District 22’s ruthless warden, Onslow, who will stop at nothing to save hisdying son – even if it means violating government protocols. Onslow believes in ESI (Enlightened Self Interest). Charlie and Maya fight to survive and fight to not succumb to the ravages of mental illness resulting from apocalyptic disintegration of society.
POPULATION PURGE was written by Brian Johnson and Toby Osborne and directed by Johnson. The film stars S. Lamar Wilson, Peter Holland, and Lyndsey Soto. It has won awards at numerous festivals including Best Feature Film / Best Cinematography at the 2023 Los Angeles Cinematography Film Festival, Best 1st Time Director of a Feature Film at the Best Actor & Director Awards, and Best Feature Under $250,000 at the 2023 International New York Film Festival.
Gravitas Ventures released the film on digital platforms on July 9, 2024. The film has a running time of 85 minutes and will not be rated by the MPAA.
Editor, Publisher Gregg W. Morris
Can be reached at gregghc@comcast.net, profgreggwmorris@gmail.com