Songbird tries to do all three of those movies in one and fails to emulate even one of them! I mean, seriously, this was a hard watch for me… I could see what the filmmakers were trying to acheive and there was serious potential for this story to resonate but then they fill the screen with pretty good actors half-arsing their performances or the good ones being buried in godawful dialogue. This was a perfect genre trilogy – the way it SHOULD be done. The Purge 3 comes round and it was more about how the Government was using the purge to control citizens. Remember when The Purge came out and we spent that first movie in ‘a house’ and what was happening outside was only hinted at? The Purge 2 came around and we hit the streets to witness the mayhem. ![]() KJ Apa (Archie from CW’s Riverdale) zips around the city doing deliveries no questions asked but when his would be girlfriend Sofia Carson (one of the Disney kids from The Descendants) is about to be forced into quarantine, he is in a race against time to save her from the powers that be. Welcome to the new normal! We spend the runtime with a handful of civilians who are living the best they can. A Track and Trace app has been developed that scans you every day to check for the virus and if you test positive Peter Stormare turns up at you door to ship you off to quarantine. It’s 2024 and a virus has spread across the world, the population is in lockdown apart from the lucky immune few. Then Songbird came out and confirmed my fears, there are filmmakers out there who will undoubtedly take advantage of this uncertain situation and use it as a plot device for some awful scripting and mildly passable acting, just to bring us some absolute rubbish. After all it does kind of lend itself to a whole host of genres and sub-genres when you really think about it. Maybe I was wrong! Maybe we are going to get some absolutely superb movies come out of this situation. These actresses had to do everything themselves including camera and stunts during a lockdown and that is impressive. ![]() I mean lets be clear these movies are going to happen because the industry THINKS that is what we want… This was one of the reasons I went into Shudder original flick Host thinking ‘OK then lets see how terrible this is.’ Then Host surprised me and did something really original, it played on natural fears and the whole pandemic was just a sub-plot which made it all the more intriguing because instead of being what the movie was about it became more the circumstances it was made in. I have been quoted as saying, more than once, that one of the things I am worried about on the other side of this god awful year we call 2020, is going to be a barrage of pandemic “covid lockdown” movies. So much so that I was initially so disappointed I wasn’t going to bother reviewing this one! I feel like in the pantheon of missed opportunities, Songbird is going to go down as one of the biggest. Stars: KJ Apa, Sofia Carson, Bradley Whitford, Demi Moore, Craig Robinson, Paul Walter Hauser, Alexandra Daddario | Written by Adam Mason, Simon Boyes | Directed by Adam Mason
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