Ethan Hawke in The PurgeTHE PURGE

If you blended The Hunger Games, David Fincher's Panic Room, and Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery" with generous helpings of ice, you'd wind up with the scare-flick smoothie that is The Purge. An eventually underwhelming yet bluntly effective chiller by writer/director James DeMonaco, the movie, admittedly, does lose its way before its 90 minutes are up. But considering how few modern releases in its genre find their way at all, it's hard to deny the primal pleasures of DeMonaco's outing, even if the film remains more thought-provoking in concept than it proves to be on-screen.