"Would You Rather" - Film Review

I watch a lot of bad movies. Sometimes I watch these bad movies by choice with the intention of making fun of them. And sometimes a film is so bad that there’s no room to make fun of it but to sit there displeased at the failures of the films. Would You Rather isn’t the worst movie ever, but it’s frequently pretty odious.

It’s a film with a thinly conceived excuse for torture porn horror excesses. I can take violence and gore and blood spatters galore, and a number of my favorite films and tv series use violence to great effect. But Would You Rather fails to understand the point of violence and especially of violence to excess in a film. 

It establishes a scenario (desperately in need of money, people choose between two awful, violent actions to win said money and stay alive) in which people are forced to do awful things; awfully violent things. At first it’s tolerable and then the justifications and the nominal thoughtfulness fade away and what remains is a film doing terrible, terrible things to its characters for seemingly no other reason than because it can. The film takes a weird, semi-fetishistic pleasure in forcing its characters do despicable things to themselves and eachothers in order to survive and to make money, as well as to fuck over other people. 

And what all this eventually leads to is you feeling like total, absolute shit. I felt lousy and a little unclean after watching Would You Rather.

There are familiar faces in the film, notably Jefferey Combs hamming it up endearingly as the sadistic host Shepard Lambrick, but also Sasha Grey as the peggable winner (she’s not there to make friends!) and an underutilized John Heard. Obligatory blonde Iris (Brittany Snow), the protagonist, is provided a thin prologue backstory to make us sympathize with her, a pat, generic story involving a sick brother in need. But we end up caring about really none of the character because they’re so underdeveloped and none of their motivations make real sense (even often from a primal stand point). 

It's not a totally unentertaining film, but it never earns the excessive bloodiness or the scenarios they take place in.

Grade: D