Choose Or Die Review: Netflix's Horror Franchise Starter Is A Muddled Mess
A cursed game that forces one to make deadly choices is a promising premise for a horror franchise that could tap into the cultural zeitgeist like The Ring and reach the same popularity levels as Final Destination. Alas, Choose or Die — Toby Meakins' feature debut from a screenplay he co-wrote with Simon Allen and Matthew James Wilkinson — falls short of expectations.
Choose or Die follows a young coder, Kayla (Iola Evans), who starts up a lost '80s choose-your-own-adventure horror game, unleashing a curse that impacts her reality. The film is evil Jumanji for those familiar with the newest films starring Dwayne Johnson and Karen Gillan. Kayla is struggling to make ends meet, so the chance to win unclaimed reward money from an old relic of a video game becomes too enticing to give up. However, when she is forced to watch a waitress eat glass, she quickly realizes that she is in the clutches of evil that can alter reality.
Related: Every Song In Choose Or Die
Netflix’s latest horror venture falls apart in almost every respect despite the premise brimming with possibilities. There is an attempt to have the horror film, and the reality it is set in, stand out enough to encourage viewers to continue being transported into the story. Choose or Die is the type of horror that has a logic-defying reality found in the aforementioned Final Destination films, the Saw franchise, and the many copycat horror films that follow a group of people haunted by something that requires smarts and luck to escape. Sadly, like so many before it, Choose or Die forgets to be a movie that can stand on its own and is rather consumed by the possibility of being a franchise.
The cast, as good as they may be in other projects, are agonizingly saddled
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