Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Choose or Die’ on Netflix, a Retro-Gamer Horror Flick

Do not get excited when you see Robert Englund’s name in the credits for new Netflix horror cheapie Choose or Die. You hear his voice speaking a few lines over a telephone and that’s it, rendering him naught but a blink of the cursor in this vintage-tech-gone-mad gorefest. No, our headliners here are relative newcomer Iola Evans and Asa Butterfield (of Hugo fame), playing two young programmers whose love of old Ataris and Commodore-64s gets them in trouble with a fiendish sentient video game from the 1980s. So should we pump some quarters into this puppy or save ’em for an Orange Julius? Let’s figure it out, hosers.

CHOOSE OR DIE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A rebellious teen and his flustered mother argue heatedly while their dad/husband Hal (Eddie Marsan) sits in another room obsessing over his 1980s video games – as usual. He fires up a game from ’84 called CURS>R and, hey, do you remember text-based games like Zork and Oregon Trail? They had no graphics and they’d prompt players with questions and you’d type in answers to continue the adventure. Well, CURS>R is one of those, except it seems to have the power to manipulate the user’s reality, e.g., Hal cracks a BEHIND YOU! Pale Ale and he looks behind himself and turns back around and the label now says FOOLED YOU! It also types out his very thoughts as he thinks them. Then it prompts him: HIS TONGUE? OR HER EARS? He pulls a puzzled expression and is prodded again: CHOOSE OR DIE! And before you know it, horrible things happen to poor Hal’s family and the opening credits run and you can forget about these people for an hour because they don’t show up again until the third act.

THREE MONTHS LATER, we meet Kayla (Iola Evans). She lives in rat-infested project housing with her deeply depressed mother Thea (Angela Griffin), who appears to self-medicate with hard drugs. Kayla had a younger brother but apparently something tragic happened to him. In her bedroom she has a little workshop where she repairs vintage computers. She pals around with fellow retro-gear dweeb Isaac (Asa Butterfield), who’d like to be her boyfriend but she’s like, hey, keep it in its holster, pal. They come across a copy of CURS>R and she takes it and parks in a restaurant and fires it up on her laptop and next thing you know, the game possesses Kayla’s waitress and forces her to chew and swallow shards of glass. This is not a fun game, not at all!

Kayla slams her laptop shut – that’ll do it! But that doesn’t do it. The world becomes some crazy dreamscape with her dead brother in it, so her only choice is to let the waitress chow down until she chokes on her own blood. Funny how the game gives her a choice when it’s actually no choice at all. So diabolical! She tells Isaac her I-know-this-sounds-crazy-but story (without actually saying “I know this sounds crazy but,” but it’s definitely implied) and it takes some convincing (“I don’t see how a video game could kill someone. Pac-Man doesn’t go around eating people!” he exclaims) but he eventually believes her. They use their comupt3r skillz to investigate the origins of CURS>R, and if you’re thinking, hey, that sounds dangerous, you’d be right on the money. And by then, we can’t help but wonder, are they playing the game, or is the game playing them? N0 SP0IL3RS!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Direct references to A Nightmare on Elm Street mingle with a concept reminiscent of Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, ghoulish omnipotent Sawisms, the retro fetishism of 8-Bit Christmas and the dumb gamer throwbackiness of Pixels.

Performance Worth Watching: Eddie Marsan is a terrific character actor, and Choose or Die proves that he has to eat, too.

Memorable Dialogue: A particularly pointed exchange between Hal and Kayla:

Hal: In the ’80s-

Kayla: F— the ’80s!

Hal: F— the ’80s?!?

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: If the screenplay for Choose or Die was a game of Tetris, it would be a collection of mismatched blocks stacked together with no rhyme, reason or coherent strategy. They form a rudimentary straight line and the game’s over quickly because nothing about the way it was put together makes sense. And crucially, it’s not much fun to play the game in that manner.

The movie has the feel of something that was either written while half-conscious or mercilessly cut to achieve its 85-minute runtime. It tosses in an emotional arc for Kayla that stirs up a modicum of empathy for her situation, but undermines it with a sub-subplot in which an apparent drug dealer (or maybe he’s just a total rando, who knows!) torments her mother for some reasons, whatever they are. The kills rely heavily on somewhat disturbing displays of self-mutilation. The laughably bad third act is complete and utter nonsensical hornswoggle. GAME OVER.

Our Call: BASICally:

10 PRINT “SKIP IT”
20 GOTO 10

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.