Review of "Choose or Die," a horror about a goddamn retro game starring "Sexual Enlightenment"
An outrageously mediocre retro horror with the potential to be a real hit.
Poor girl Kayla (Ayola Evans) works as a janitor and tries to provide for her drug-addicted mother. The women live in a cheap, cramped apartment and barely pay their bills. Only a miracle could save them, for example, if Kayla, suffering one rejection after another, had still got her coveted job as a programmer. However, so far the heroine's passion for technology remains an unprofitable hobby. Everything changes when, together with her close friend Isaac (Isaac Butterfield), she finds a retro game, the prize for the passage of which will give them a chance at a cloudless future. However, the quest called "CURS>R" has a side-effect: anyone who dares to participate will be drawn into a competition at the price of life.
With mediocre Netflix horror movies, you always want to be more loyal and tolerant than it is worth. In the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, you inadvertently look for (and sometimes even find) echoes of the original's former greatness. In the "Streets of Fear" trilogy, you carefully look for meanings and subtexts behind the annoying nostalgic flare. In "Deadly Choice", with all the desire and love for the genre, it is difficult to find something good for a number of reasons. It's not that Tobey Meekins' directorial debut came out completely hopeless. A couple of episodes successfully copy "torture porn" from the famous "Saw," and other scenes, like the interactive Black Mirror series "Brandishmyg," turn the retro aesthetic from a cult item into a mere nightmare. But otherwise, between these rare finds lies a veritable scripted vacuum.
First of all, "Deadly Choice" doesn't look like a finished feature film. It is a set of sketches, a raw application for an ambitious debut, which still has to go through dozens of screenwriting drafts (this is the name given to the draft versions of material that are constantly being finalized before shooting). In dynamics and timing, the picture looks more like a TV series pilot: too many questions, too few answers, and, most frustrating of all, an incredibly large amount of unrealized potential. At the credits, you hope that in a few seconds Netflix will automatically take you to the next episode, but instead you are admiring the gnarly digital glitches with the creators' names.
And second, Toby Meekins' work does not reveal even a fraction of the themes and questions it takes on at first. What drives retromancers? Why is pop culture so obsessed with nostalgia? The very aesthetics of "Deadly Choice" could have been ideal ground for a no-nonsense horror cyberpunk. The action takes place in an oppressive present, in the midst of poor ghettos and half-basements, but digital reality soon begins to take over the characters' bleak surroundings. Instead of a movie, it's a demo; instead of a masterful creepypasta, it's a viral screener video. If this movie were a game, you could only install it from a scratched floppy disk.
This article was sponsored by Sonja Hutcheson
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