13 Sins (2014)
Directed by Daniel Stamm
Drowning in debt as he's about to get married, a bright but meek salesman receives a mysterious phone call informing him that he's on a hidden-camera game show where he must execute 13 tasks to receive a multi-million dollar cash prize.
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What critics compared 13 Sins to
And then there are the challenges themselves, each one a little nastier and more outrageous than the last in a film that suggests a bizarre hybrid of “The Game,” “The Truman Show” and “Fear Factor”: The easy, early rounds find Elliot literally harming a fly and making a child cry (the latter a task borrowed from the Thai original, although mercifully, that pic’s feces-eating dare didn’t survive the English translation).
We've seen it on taut psychological display in David Fincher's “The Game,” James Wan's “Saw” begat an entire franchise on it, and more recently E.L. Katz's “Cheap Thrills” had all sorts of delirious fun with it during the festival circuit.
Not only is the film a remake of a Thai film by the name of 13: Game of Death, but also cribs thematic elements from David Fincher’s The Game, as well as plenty of others.
This is familiar territory for anyone who has seen 13 Beloved, its American remake 13 Sins, or E.L. Katz’s spectacular 2013 debut, Cheap Thrills, though comparing Nerve to any of these is unfair because it is fundamentally different on a molecular level: It’s a post-Social Network movie combined with YA tropes, where everyone equipped with a smartphone is represented with graphic captions that jut into New York’s skyline like neon flagpoles.
NERVE plays like an adolescent version of it, although it apparently has a number of predecessors including a Thai horror movie “13: Game of Death,” its American remake “13 Sins,” and Jeanne Ryan’s original novel “Nerve.”
Stand-outs include lovely Rutina Wesley (TV?s True Blood) as Elliot?s stunned bride to be, Tom Bower ( Appaloosa) as his aggravating father, Devon Graye (Husk) as his Rainman-like sibling, and Ron Perlman ( Hellboy) as a detective who may or may not have an agenda of his own.