Review: Choose Or Die

Image courtesy of Netflix.

At one point during Netflix's relatively brief new horror movie, "Choose or Die," a character confronted by a villainous individual blasphemes the 1980s after being told that said villainous individual collects memorabilia from that decade. The character doing the blaspheming - Kayla (Iola Evans) - may feel that way, but director Toby Meakins' film clearly does not.

Teeming with '80s callbacks - "A Nightmare on Elm Street" poster on a wall and video game graphics that appear straight out of that era - the film is obviously trying to recreate a "Brainscan" or "Ghost in the Machine" type of throwback horror movie. Robert Englund even pops up - but in voice only - as the narrator to the titular computer game that lures its victims in and forces them to take part in dangerous games of choice.

The setup is on the no-frills end of the spectrum. The picture opens with an '80s memorabilia lover (played by Eddie Marsan, in a delectably disturbed recurring cameo) who gets sucked into the game, which forces him to choose during the picture's opening sequence involving his wife squabbling with their son between having her ears or the boy's tongue removed. Ick.

We then cut to Kayla, whose character has some relatively vague traumas of the past, including a drowned younger brother and a mother (Angela Griffin) who is addicted to drugs and at the mercy of a sleazy dealer (Ryan Gage), who makes unpleasant sexual advances toward Kayla.

Kayla's best pal is Isaac (Asa Butterfield), who not-so-secretly likes her, and he is enlisted to help her once she stumbles upon the game Choose or Die, her intro being a scene at a diner in which she must make a choice that results in a perky waitress there being forced to munch on glass. Ick, again.

Once we finally get to the sequence late in the film when Kayla and Isaac's snooping leads to some discovery, the explanation for how the deadly game came to exist is, well, somewhat nonsensical. Thankfully, it is followed by the film's demented finale - its piece de resistance - in which Kayla meets up with Marsan's character at a dining room table sequence that has to be seen to be believed. The sequence slightly lifts the picture from the dreary doldrums in which it had existed during the previous hour.

But alas, it's not enough. "Choose or Die" may have a memorable ending, but the journey there is mostly generic, short on inspiration (a sequence in which Kayla fights off her drowned younger brother in an empty swimming pool is particularly unnecessary) and lacking adequate explanation for its story. 

The film often feels as if it's making the story up as it goes along. The picture's villainous video game forces its unwilling participants to choose between two bad choices, and the irony is that the film itself is mostly one poor choice after another.