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Choose, 2011
Fiona (Katheryn Winnick) is a college student who is haunted by her mother’s death by suicide. When a mysterious figure begins accosting people and forcing them into terrible choices, Fiona ends up working unofficially with her father, Tom (Kevin Pollack), a police detective, to get to the bottom of the horrific attacks. As Fiona realizes that the bad guy has his eye on her, she must also determine how she is connected to him.
Cruising along as a fun, if silly, horror-thriller, this one seriously derails in the last 10 minutes or so.
There’s a happy zone of stupid where some truly great horror movies live. No shame in that game. And this movie sits nicely in that zone of dumb for almost all of its run time. Police letting a college student help out with a grisly serial murder/assault case? Check. Absurdly complicated messages and codes that are solved in stupid or weird ways? Check. Murder tableaus inexplicably left in place by police because it makes for a nice visual? Check! For almost all of the film, this is in that sweet spot where you’re sort of laughing at it, but also genuinely trying to sort out how it all fits together. (I was sure I had it cracked, and repeatedly and confidently asserted that my solution was the only plausible one).
And while the film is in that good zone, there’s plenty to like about it. Winnick is a very solid lead, and with a few exceptions, her actions seem reasonable in the grand scheme of the film’s plot. Kevin Pollack is engaging as always, though he seems to be one of the only actors with that “what kind of movie am I in” vibe at times. Bruce Dern shows up for a few minutes as a psychiatrist who is tangentially connected with the case. Everyone here is fine, with no real negative standouts. (Okay, Fiona’s boyfriend is THE WORST, but that is a writing/character problem, not an actor problem).
In a movie this silly, I don’t actually want to be all that disturbed by the gore/violence, and thankfully it’s all in the right degree for my taste in this kind of film. More often than not, the violence here is conceptual and briefly visual. A pianist forced to cut off his fingers is more pondered than portrayed (and when it is portrayed, sorry, I did laugh). Sometimes silly films go with graphic violence, and to me that always feels like a mismatch.
I was already writing essentially a C+ review for this movie in my head, but then the last act kicks in. I think that thinking of a neat horror concept isn’t all that terribly hard, but figuring out how to follow that idea through to an ending is. The closer the movie gets to the end, the more you feel it begin to sweat. You wonder how on earth the movie is going to pull all its threads together, and the simple answer is that it doesn’t. It also can’t resist the bane of the modern horror film: A FINAL SURPRISE! In this case, something that made me boo outloud and also managed to raise like ten questions on top of the ones that were already going unanswered. This is a film that makes rules and then, when it tells you why, you realize that it’s also breaking them just to make the pieces fit.
Very close to a lazy afternoon goofy horror slightly-above-average success, but the wheels really come off at the end.
Choose, 2011
Fiona (Katheryn Winnick) is a college student who is haunted by her mother’s death by suicide. When a mysterious figure begins accosting people and forcing them into terrible choices, Fiona ends up working unofficially with her father, Tom (Kevin Pollack), a police detective, to get to the bottom of the horrific attacks. As Fiona realizes that the bad guy has his eye on her, she must also determine how she is connected to him.
Cruising along as a fun, if silly, horror-thriller, this one seriously derails in the last 10 minutes or so.
There’s a happy zone of stupid where some truly great horror movies live. No shame in that game. And this movie sits nicely in that zone of dumb for almost all of its run time. Police letting a college student help out with a grisly serial murder/assault case? Check. Absurdly complicated messages and codes that are solved in stupid or weird ways? Check. Murder tableaus inexplicably left in place by police because it makes for a nice visual? Check! For almost all of the film, this is in that sweet spot where you’re sort of laughing at it, but also genuinely trying to sort out how it all fits together. (I was sure I had it cracked, and repeatedly and confidently asserted that my solution was the only plausible one).
And while the film is in that good zone, there’s plenty to like about it. Winnick is a very solid lead, and with a few exceptions, her actions seem reasonable in the grand scheme of the film’s plot. Kevin Pollack is engaging as always, though he seems to be one of the only actors with that “what kind of movie am I in” vibe at times. Bruce Dern shows up for a few minutes as a psychiatrist who is tangentially connected with the case. Everyone here is fine, with no real negative standouts. (Okay, Fiona’s boyfriend is THE WORST, but that is a writing/character problem, not an actor problem).
In a movie this silly, I don’t actually want to be all that disturbed by the gore/violence, and thankfully it’s all in the right degree for my taste in this kind of film. More often than not, the violence here is conceptual and briefly visual. A pianist forced to cut off his fingers is more pondered than portrayed (and when it is portrayed, sorry, I did laugh). Sometimes silly films go with graphic violence, and to me that always feels like a mismatch.
I was already writing essentially a C+ review for this movie in my head, but then the last act kicks in. I think that thinking of a neat horror concept isn’t all that terribly hard, but figuring out how to follow that idea through to an ending is. The closer the movie gets to the end, the more you feel it begin to sweat. You wonder how on earth the movie is going to pull all its threads together, and the simple answer is that it doesn’t. It also can’t resist the bane of the modern horror film: A FINAL SURPRISE! In this case, something that made me boo outloud and also managed to raise like ten questions on top of the ones that were already going unanswered. This is a film that makes rules and then, when it tells you why, you realize that it’s also breaking them just to make the pieces fit.
Very close to a lazy afternoon goofy horror slightly-above-average success, but the wheels really come off at the end.