Ok. Hmmmmmm.
The setup for this movie is dissuasive: Once a year, an ancient secret society “The Locusts” stages “Night Of The Locusts”, where innocent people are set up for home invasions and bloody violence which must be finished within three hours, because, movie. Basically, sounds like a ripoff of “The Purge” crossed with the ubiquitously shitty home invasion horror exploitation subgenre, a subgenre I’ve hated since “Last House On The Left”.
However, having watched it… you know, if only one of these movies was ever to have been made—and only one should have been, that sounds about right to me—this one would be it.
Instead of focusing on the violence, the movie spends a lot of time on tensions between the home invaders. There are long, slow sequences where nothing happens: an intended victim hides below the bed while one of the killers is in the room, and… everybody just waits. And waits. Meanwhile the killers argue about the arcane rules they’re supposed to follow or discuss how they’re going to commit their atrocities, almost in real time, while the audience sits there and no violence happens. Which to me, is a good thing. The story is still about a half-inch deep, very little is ever really explained, but at least they attempted to make it slightly more about suspense and character interactions than just nonstop violence, which is very unusual for one of these films, in which violence is supposed to provide the entertainment, and the villains are usually no more three-dimensional than required to give them some reason for wanton violence.
There’s actually very little violence in this film, just lots of talking about violence, planning violence, and waiting for violence. To me it made for a better movie than just violence, like most of these films present, does. That’s not to say it’s an especially good movie; just to say that it’s an especially good movie for a shallow home invasion flick.
Looking on IMDB afterwards, this movie has extraordinarily poor reviews, which surprised me, although around the web some reviewers seemed to feel, as I did, that it was a little different and better for this awful genre. I think a lot of the IMDB reviewers expected more violence and felt disappointed.
Look, I enjoyed “The Purge”, but, that’s a singular movie, and we don’t need another repeat of it. I like that this turned out not to be. At least, not entirely. This will probably stand as the one home invasion exploitation horror flick that I ever didn’t hate. Take that weak compliment as you will.