Super Spooks-Ganza Presents: WOULD YOU RATHER

	Would you rather A) watch and review a bunch of shitty horror movies on Netflix, or B) play and review a bunch of shitty indie horror games on Steam Greenlight. Obviously enough I picked A, though to be fair they're rather similar with being shorter than two hours and often feature a plethora of jump scares.
	Would You Rather, the movie, is a 2013 totally-not-Saw psychological thriller featuring Jeffrey Combs. I really can't emphasize the 'totally-not-Saw' angle enough, because even though it came out several years after the Saw franchise ended (not counting Jigsaw), it's blatantly trying to follow in Saw's footsteps. Which is to say it's a torture porn spectacle where the tension comes from people being forced to commit grievous bodily harm to themselves and others, with mountingly sadistic contrivances. In case you couldn't tell, I'm not fond of this movie.
	The movie stars Iris, a down on her luck young woman, and the first scene is her awkwarding her way through a job interview at a restaurant. As the conversation between her and the interviewer so conveniently tells us, it's to help take care of her sick younger brother. Quick dose of backstory and character establishment, I suppose. It doesn't set much of the mood up or really let us know what's actually going on, so I'm not sure how absolutely necessary it was, but at least it does something.
	Anyway, intro title sequence, featuring ominous music and panning shots of x-ray photographs. Because, y'know. The saw franchise. Gotta show off dem bones in a medical context to let us know how much mutilation is going to be involved.
	Iris has a meeting with her doctor where he introduces her to the elusive Shephard Lambrick, head of some big fancy aristocratic Lambrick family. Iris explains her brother's dire need of a bone-marrow transplant, and Lambrick says that his family is hosting an 'event' with a 'game' where the winner will be 'taken care of'. I can smell the premise coming a mile away - fancy dinner party where the guests are forced to make horrific decisions. I wouldn't call it a crude build-up, nothing here comes off as too contrived or forced, so that's a point in the movie's favor, but it's also fairly predictable and obvious, so I was almost rolling my eyes and telling the movie to get on with it. Hey, at least it takes the time to make Iris a fairly sympathetic person, so when the spookers do eventually hit we're really rooting for her to win.
	Quick conversation with her brother Raleigh back home, where he keeps trying to convince her to live her own life without him burdening her (pay attention, class, this becomes important alter on), and then Iris receives a phone call telling her that she was not being accepted at the restaurant job. Which, again is super predictable and obvious, leads her to call Shep Lambrick to enter the game.  Another thing I'll give this movie is that it actually splices the scene of her getting the phone call/ contacting Lambrick with a scene of her talking with her brother about how much she cares for him. Quick cuts between them, which does do a really great job of showing her care for him being the driving factor to her involvement with the Lambricks without being too on the nose about it. Honestly, that's my favorite scene in the movie because of how well it mixes character with plot in a show-don't-tell way, so kudos to you Would You Rather.
	Anywho, a car picks her up and takes her to some swanky manor. She meets up with the other contestants in a scene reminiscent of Clue, and we get a crash course on the other characters. Peter the gambler. Conway the old grumpy dude (he's apparently filled with conspiracy theories about the Lambricks. Would've been a good way to create mystery about who they are, but it's a throwaway line that never gets a followup), Linda the old lady in a wheelchair, Travis the PTSD vet, Amy the unlikable bitch, and so forth.
	Two quick things happen at this point, which I need to mention because they eventually lead into two huge failures of the movie. One is that it cuts back to the doctor that introduced Iris to Shephard Lambrick, as he's lamenting his decision to put her on this path. The other is a scene of Shephard speaking with his son Julian, who looks and talks and acts like a fucking rat. Shephard is giving him some rules about what he can do during "the game", while admonishing him for something he did last year. Why is this important, you ask? I'll get to that in due time.
	They get ushered into the dining room to eat, and this is where the movie really gets into gear. Lambrick introduces Julian and Bevans, a creepy bald butler. Because of fucking course he has a creepy bald butler. This dinner scene sort of sets up what the main gimmick is, in that Shephard offers large amounts of cash for breaking certain commitments they held. Iris is paid ten thousand dollars to eat meat. She's a vegetarian. It wasn't really established that she was a vegetarian right up until now, which does feel like a copout. Also Conway gets offered fifty thousand dollars to, as a recovering alcoholic, drink a decanter of scotch. I mention all this because it does act as a sort of prelude to the main event. Shephard is kind of kooky, and has a thing for twisting people around his finger.
	Also he explains the rules of the game, which is important. Would You Rather, but everyone has to do one of the choices, decisions are timed, last person who is able to continue is the winner. Refusing to make a choice gets you eliminated. Yada yada, this is filling in stuff the audience probably already gets the idea of. Then Bevans, the former MI5 interrogator, rolls in the shock torture device. Also Conway realizes how fucked up the situation is, tries to leave, and gets shot fatally, which really signals that things are kicking off.
	This marks the half-hour point, so a third of the way into things. Honestly, as far as shitty netflix horror movies go, that's a decent amount of build-up. As much flak as I'm giving Would You Rather, pacing isn't one of them, though towards the end it does feel like they're kind of rushing things along.
	First round! Two guests are strapped to the car battery torture device, and one is given the controller, and can either shock them or the other person. Cal, who was a chill guy that spoke with Iris during the introduction scene, is strapped alongside Amy the bitch. He elects to shock himself. It goes along the line, with Amy being strapped in alongside Linda the old lady, and without hesitation shocks Linda, helping to establish Amy as the "I don't care about team work I'm in this for myself" character. Linda shocks the next guy in line, and it goes down the row, ending with Iris shocking herself rather than forcing Cal to take a second dose of electricity. Here the group is mostly about working together and sharing the load.
	The problem is that, at this point there's been two more cuts back to the doctor, where he grabs a handgun and leaves his house, apparently guilt-stricken into action. The cuts to him are barely a few seconds long, very abrupt, and feel entirely tacked on. Spoilers, this sub-plot goes absolutely fucking nowhere, so I'm entirely justified in saying it was a waste of time to put me through them.
	After this they're given a moment to rest up for the second round, where they get to meet Julian properly. Oh boy what a meet this is, he's a complete and utter shit. Smug, arrogant fuck that calls everyone pigs and reminds them all how he's better than they are. This is laid on heavy and hard, to the point where I was rolling my eyes at this caricature of a person. Travis the soldier says that they should be shown at least some suspect, and the very idea of someone talking back enrages Julian. Spoilers: The Julian sub-plot also goes fucking nowhere.
	Round two. Iris goes first, and can either stab Cal in the thigh with an ice pick or give Travis three lashes across the back with a whipping staff. Travis, being the stand-up guy that he is, encourages her to whip him, which she does out of fear of stabbing Cal in his femoral artery. Then it's the next person's turn, and he can...stab Iris or whip Travis three more times. And the next person can either stab someone or whip Travis. Then Travis can either stab someone or have Bevans whip him three times. Talking back to Julian got Travis singled out, despite the earlier warning about 'minimal participation on our part'.
	From this scene out, the sadistic torture porn really gets amped up. Linda gets stabbed in the thigh by Peter the gambler, who reckons that her paralysis from the waist down gives them a free out. He stabs her in the artery and she shortly dies of blood loss. Peter is a fucking idiot throughout this whole movie. Linda stabs Amy super fast as revenge for the electrocution, and Amy gleefully stabs Iris in her side, barely missing her lung. Cal, who was trying to convince them to work as a team, breaks down and figures that Travis is dead anyway as he's passed out from pain and blood loss, and whips him again, practically guaranteeing his death. On one hand, this helps show how the group is slowly breaking down. On the other, there's a distinct lack of horror in what's actually going on. It's just torture porn. Nothing too gruesome happens on-screen, but at the same time it feels like it's trying too hard to say HEY LOOK AT ME LOOK HOW BRUTAL AND GRITTY I AM REMEMBER SAW? People being torn down to their base, selfish instincts and violently hurting each other while Shephard Lambrick is being almost flamboyant and gleeful in his merriment. There is a sense of the elite preying on people's needs and weaknesses, but this is more sad than it is horrific or despair-filled.
	Also the contrivances are building up. Cal's emotional breakdown and switch from promoting teamwork to willingly finishing off Travis comes too abruptly and forced. There's more cuts to the doctor sneaking onto the manor grounds, which also feels out of place. The entire setup, with Julian being such a parody of a character and singling out Travis, to Amy's selfishness getting her the ability to stab any player and just so happening to pick our main character Iris, despite the two having no interactions before, falls in line with how stock standard Would You Rather comes off as. This entire movie is Saw meets the Trolley dilemma, which is hilarious in a kinda crappy way.
	Next scene is where the group tries to make a break for it. Grab the ice pick and whipping staff, attack Shep and Bevans's staff, and try to run. Cal gets shot almost immediately, but Iris makes it out of the dining room with Bevans following her. The idea makes sense and I guess is a nice way to mix things up. There's several problems, though.
	One: Despite being a former MI5 agent, Bevans's idea of chasing after someone is strolling casually while not looking in obvious hiding spots. Two: Julians does find Iris and tries to rape her, only to get stabbed in the leg with the ice pick she was carrying. Three: The doctor makes his grand appearance, pointing a gun at Julian to keep him away from Iris. The doctor starts to apologize, and is immediately shot mid-speech in the head by Bevans. I don't know if the writers thought they were being clever with this witty deconstruction of a heroic save, but it just irritated me with the doctor's sub-plot being so anti-climactic. It's a waste of time, and now I'm pretty sure this sequence was tacked on at a later point for padding or some other reason.
	Bevans escorts Iris back to the dining room, and Julian is taken upstairs for medical attention while whining about how Iris should be punished for stabbing him. That's the last we see or hear of him for the entire movie. Yep. There's no comeuppance, no resolution to his character, nothing. He's not even mentioned at all for the rest of the movie. We could've had a karmic death where he's punished for transgressing the rules of the game, or even a way to establish how untouchable the Lambricks are, but there's absolutely fucking nothing. Yet another waste of time and a character, but this one leads into a theory of mine. More on that later.
	Next round! The four remaining guests are given an envelope, and can choose between the unknown of the punishment in the envelope, or the known punishment of having their head dunked in a barrel of water for two minutes and risk drowning. On one hand, their choices are fairly tense, with the formless dread of whatever could be within the envelope versus the very real fear of drowning. On the other hand, it's just another way to ratchet up the sadistic saw-like torture porn. This round is probably the most tense in the movie, but at the same time one of my bigger gripes with torture porn is that it's not scary, it's just fucking gross.
	Peter, the idiot gambler, makes a big long speech reminiscent of the Sicilian from Princess Bride. He's a gambler and is trying to play the odds, but they knew he's a gambler and would try to play the odds so they went with the opposite choice, but he knew they knew and so forth. Either way, he takes the envelope, and is forced to light a firecracker, which is a full quarter stick of dynamite, in his hand. His hand is completely mutilated and he dies of a heart attack. Lucas, the next guy, also decides the envelope, and has to slit out his own eye with a razor. The only good point I'll give this is that the way the camera jerks away from him at the last second is nicely done and gives a good sense of 'what the fuck'.
	Iris's turn. She takes the water. While she's being drowned slowly, she flashes back to Raleigh talking about a dream where they were all in a boat and he was pulling her under the water. Looking back it's a bit out of place and obvious, but as I watched it I didn't quite get the significance of it and his earlier fears of being a burden, so I guess I can't complain. Iris does survive, obviously, and apparently her card was to have all her teeth extracted by Bevans, so she lucked out.
	Amy the bitch's turn. Shep lets it slip that her ex-husband drowned their child, which does help nicely to give her some motivation for not choosing the water barrel. Like Iris's vegetarianism, this is hampered by the fact it's a revelation given ten seconds before it comes into play, which isn't the best of foreshadowing. Her punishment is, shocking twist, having her head held in the barrel of water for four minutes. I don't know if this is meant to feel karmic or anything, but it comes off as just sad and depraved, like much of this movie.
	Final round, and I really wanna fucking get this review over with. Iris and Lucas. Iris is handed a gun, and told that she can either do nothing and have both of them walk away empty-handed, or shoot him and walk away with fat stacks of cash and a donor for Raleigh's bone-marrow transplant. Lucas says less than a dozen words before Iris shoots him.
	This is, admittedly, a bit of where the movie was going. The group started off being about teamwork and did kind of break down as the game went on, as evidenced by Cal whipping Travis, but it really wasn't showcased as well as it could have been. When they try to escape they show a decent amount of teamwork, which goes against the message of what people will do when the chips are down, and despite her love for Raleigh comes off as a bit out of place for Iris as a character.
	Iris is given the fat stacks of cash, and returns home to Raleigh. To find out he committed suicide by ODing on his medication, thus bringing an end to the character arc of him not wanting to burden her, even while she's brutalizing her fellow man to help him. It isn't bad in the foreshadowing department, as per his earlier speech and the flashback about his drowning dream, much better than most of the netflix horror on here. That being said, it's still not great. Horror movies are given more leeway in that they can have bad ends very easily and do bad things to good people, but after sitting through an hour and a half of shitty torture porn I'm just tired of it all.
	So yeah. It's Saw. Nothing bad happened to any of the Lambricks, and I get the serious feeling they thought this would kick off a big fancy Would You Rather franchise. So they can't kill off Shep or Julian, as they would want them to make a return in the sequel, probably with new victims. One of the developing stuidos was "Lambrick Productions LLC", which only reinforces this theory. Realizing this took a huge chunk out of the movie, because plot armor is still plot armor, even if its for the villains, and I could tell this really wanted to go all the way with being the new Saw.
	It's torture porn. It's just a spectacle with no depth or meaning. The theme of people breaking down in the name of selfishness (What would you do to fix your life's problems) really wasn't emphasized enough, and it has multiple character arcs just go nowhere, aside from Iris's. She falls from grace with Lucas's murder and pays for it on realizing that it didn't solve anything, but the actual villains who force her into it and try to rape her get off scot free. Jeffrey Combs was actively enjoying playing the whimsical Shephard Lambrick, at least, because his performance was top notch. Equal parts amused and sadistic, with just the right amount of theatrical flair. Other than that, and the one scene I mentioned near the beginning, Would You Rather really doesn't have anything going for it outside being a sad little Saw derivative. Not even the good parts of Saw, just the parts where someone has to do something brutal and horrid or face an even worse brutal horrid being done to them.