David Guy Levy
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1985's "Clue" is stripped of its giddy absurdist humor and replaced by a deadly, unsparing seriousness in "Would You Rather," a gripping horror-drama that's far more ruminative than " Saw ," but destined to draw a comparison because of its onscreen game of wits and violence.
This isn�t a blood-soaked charnel-house mind-game like the Saw flicks; it leans more towards psychological violence.
An overly static, dining-room-set variation on the “Saw” movies in which Brittany Snow, Sasha Grey, John Heard and others are subjected to an evil millionaire’s most dangerous, and dull, game.
That’s the question at the heart of 2004’s re-invigoration of the horror genre Saw, a film which went to great lengths to horrify audiences in a new way and spawned a number of look-alike films that have tried their own unique twists on the torture porn subgenre.
The results are a gorgeous, tension-filled thriller that feels a bit like Clue meets Saw meets House on Haunted Hill with an engaging and eclectic cast that makes it almost impossible to look away during the film's many cringe-inducing moments.
Like the coolest moments of the Saw franchise, Would You Rather gives the astute horror viewer some interesting food for thought: is it easier to give pain or to receive it?
The others are subjected to electroshock treatments, whippings, stabbings with an ice pick, the slicing open of an eyeball with a razor blade (cringeworthy, but hardly original; people who saw Un Chien Andalou have cringed already) and drowning by submerging one’s head in a barrel of water for two minutes.
What it inspires is morbid curiosity (will that guy actually perform an un chien andalou on his own eyeball?), which isn't the same thing.
1985's "Clue" is stripped of its giddy absurdist humor and replaced by a deadly, unsparing seriousness in "Would You Rather," a gripping horror-drama that's far more ruminative than " Saw ," but destined to draw a comparison because of its onscreen game of wits and violence.
The results are a gorgeous, tension-filled thriller that feels a bit like Clue meets Saw meets House on Haunted Hill with an engaging and eclectic cast that makes it almost impossible to look away during the film's many cringe-inducing moments.
It's easy to root for semi-horror movies of this sort when they're clearly made on a dime by a writer-director with as much of an aversion toward needless gore and cheap scares as most moviegoers, but it doesn't help that the premise—in which a mansion full of archetypes agree to play a game without realizing its life-or-death stakes—brings to mind everything from And Then There Were None to Clue.
Throughout David Guy Levy’s tautly done piece of trash I kept flashing on two movies, Pasolini’s Salo (for obvious reasons) and the 1932 The Most Dangerous Game, which posited Leslie Banks as a demonic deserted island overlord bent on making miserable the lives of his captive prey, Joel McCrea and Fay Wray.
And a subplot lifted wholesale from Misery, featuring Lawrence Gilliard Jr. in the Richard Farnsworth role of thwarted saviour, is not only a travesty of execution too pathetic to laugh at, it also cluelessly sacrifices a black man at the altar of a white woman--maybe the whitest woman, what with a name like Brittany Snow.
Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976)
Directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini
influenced Would You Rather (2013)
Themes
Throughout David Guy Levy’s tautly done piece of trash I kept flashing on two movies, Pasolini’s Salo (for obvious reasons) and the 1932 The Most Dangerous Game, which posited Leslie Banks as a demonic deserted island overlord bent on making miserable the lives of his captive prey, Joel McCrea and Fay Wray.
At least these brief scenes are over quickly, paving the way for the immediate dastardly quandary at hand, a committed, emotionally available Brittany Snow (2012's " Pitch Perfect "), as Iris, and an unforgettably calm, disquieting Jeffrey Combs (2002's " FearDotCom "), as Lambrick, leading an exceptional ensemble cast who linger like spirits in one's memory even after their lifeless bodies are dragged from the room.
It's easy to root for semi-horror movies of this sort when they're clearly made on a dime by a writer-director with as much of an aversion toward needless gore and cheap scares as most moviegoers, but it doesn't help that the premise—in which a mansion full of archetypes agree to play a game without realizing its life-or-death stakes—brings to mind everything from And Then There Were None to Clue.
(Porn star–turned-actress Sasha Grey is among the cannon fodder, but she's rarely given the chance to flaunt the genuine acting abilities she displayed in The Girlfriend Experience so much as look callously amused by the cruelty she both inflicts and observes.)
The thing of it all is that Truth or Dare was made for a specific subset of the theater-going audience (read: not old fogeys like myself), and it's pretty enjoyable overall what Wadlow is able to do with this idea that’s a total 180 from what you’d expect from the initial concept (when it was first announced, I was wholly expecting something more in line with Would You Rather than anything with a supernatural slant to it).
Combs' performance as Lambrick leads the talented ensemble and is nothing short of brilliant as he proves once again that he was born to play these kinds of smarmy, conflict-inducing characters (a la The Frighteners).
More akin to the 2009 psychological competition in Exam, visual effects artist and screenwriter Steffan Schlachtenhaufen’s script permits director David Guy Levy to turn the camera away from the violence as it appears on screen, thus keeping tension higher than in a film flooded with blood and gore.
"Inevitable dashes of pretension" include the odd mention of The Shining as a visual touchstone and Levy expressing surprise that no one's ever pointed out the ugliness of the movie's food.
Similar to horror films like Stay Alive , Truth or Dare , and Would You Rather , this film takes on a game gone wrong to the extreme.
That it's all been done before in films like "Series 7: The Contenders," "Cheap Thrills," "Would You Rather," "The Den" and "Unfriended" with a climax lifted from "The Hunger Games," makes it all the more difficult to find much of interest here.
The rich fiend (Jeffrey Combs, of the ’80s flick “Re-Animator”) offers money to those going through life crises, with a catch: They must play a game of “Would You Rather.”
The busy actor, best known for his iconic work as Dr. Herbert West in three Re-Animator movies, is diabolically front and center in the indie thriller Would You Rather.
Would You Rather has one major asset in an appropriately gothic, larger-than-life performance by Jeffrey Combs, the great, chameleon-like character actor best known for playing a mad scientist in Re-Animator.
What she doesn’t know until it’s too late is that the benefactor, Sheppard Lambrick (played by genre veteran Jeffrey Combs of Re-Animator fame), doesn’t provide his largesse without a serious catch.
Oh, and did I mention Herbert West from Re-Animator plays the villain?
Marketing appears sparse otherwise, as the film's official Facebook page boasts a whopping three posts, and actual box office is most likely to stay at the "unreported" lower level of more typical IFC Midnight releases like Would You Rather or the Cabin Fever remake.