Many Netflix viewers are loving a new horror flick starring Asa Butterfield – despite the fact it’s got a fairly terrible Rotten Tomatoes score. Watch the trailer here:
Starring Asa Butterfield, Iola Evans, Eddie Marsan and even Freddy Krueger legend Robert Englund, Choose or Die follows two friends who ‘reboot a mysterious 1980s video game’ in a bid to win an unclaimed £125,000 prize, inadvertently stepping into a ‘surreal world of next-level horror’.
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A synopsis from Netflix says: “After firing up a lost 80s survival horror game, a young coder unleashes a hidden curse that tears reality apart, forcing her to make terrifying decisions and face deadly consequences.”
After the film dropped on the steaming site earlier this month, reaction has been somewhat mixed – with a 30 percent score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, but a fair amount of praise over on Twitter.
Tweeting their thoughts on the movie, one fan said: “Holy s**t. The new horror movie on Netflix “Choose Or Die” is actually so good. I needed some horror with a fresh idea.”
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Someone else said: “OMG I just finished a movie on Netflix called Choose or Die and it was really good, 10/10, would recommend.”
Another said they didn’t know why it had such a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes, saying: “Ok but Choose or Die on Netflix was actually really good.”
A fourth said the film gave them an ‘Archive 81 mixed with Jumanji vibe’ and that they loved the ‘80's horror energy’, while another commented: “Choose or Die on Netflix extremely good.”
However, some people thought the movie was ‘stupid as hell’ and ‘abysmal’, with one tweeting: “Man I just watched some trash ass movie on Netflix. Choose or Die had to be the worst movie I’ve seen since Jeepers Creepers 3 lol.”
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The lukewarm reception from critics has also earned the film a not-too-brilliant score of 30 percent on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer.
Benjamin Lee from the Guardian gave it just two stars, writing: “The specifics of the plot make little to no real sense, even in the moment, but that won’t much matter to the sleepover crowd, who’ll be too distracted by the nasty noise of it all. Don’t understand how a malevolent curse ties to game code? Who cares, here’s a teenager eating his arm! In a choice between coherence and cruelty, it’s an easy win.”
Screenrant’s Ferdosa Abdi went for just one-and-a-half stars, saying it relies too much on the ‘premise being interesting’, but that ‘the execution is boring’.
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Abdi added of the ‘muddled’ movie: “The film can’t overcome the sense of silliness it so desperately tries to evade. There are remnants of a good horror movie here, but it is bogged down by a dreariness that stifles any creativity or individualism this story could possess."
Dennis Harvey of Variety, meanwhile, said: “While there have been worse-crafted, even more routinely formulaic Netflix horror efforts, this one takes the cake for sheer whateverness of barely-there plot, concept, character detailing and so on. If some movies now seem designed to be consumed on phones, this one demands so little attention, for such scant rewards, you could probably watch it while vacuuming or doing yoga without missing anything important.”
Topics: TV and Film, Netflix
Jess Hardiman