It will probably do well there, as fans of the above can find almost enough here to play, though they may, like me, be a little surprised at how ugly this quick horror, made with more attention to the quotient of audacity than any level of creativity. It is part of the accursed subspecies of technology that expanded after the success of Gore Verbinski’s amazingly effective remake of The Ring, later renamed The Ring. It led to more similar Asian horror remakes, such as One Missed Call, Pulse and Shutter, and then also to a number of US copies, such as Feardotcom, Unfriended and Stay Alive, a 2006 failure that saw a group of teenagers play a deadly video. . game. We are in a similar, but slightly more capable, area here with the discovery of a dusty 1980s game called CURS> R (the original title of the movie), which forces players to make genuine life or death decisions. Found by the obsessive Isaac (Butterfield) of the 1980s, forced by the idea that the $ 125,000 cash prize might remain unsolicited and further seduced by Freddy Krueger’s own recorded voice, Robert Englund line. His girlfriend and affectionate, Kayla (a relative of newcomer Iola Evans) is less convinced, but living on the bread front is willing to take risks, struggling to make ends meet with a miserable cleaner’s salary. And so it begins. What is vaguely refreshing about this admittedly rather bizarre set-up is that Kayla is not the tangible one who could have been in another more clichéd version of this story, but the one who starts the game herself to play. He is just as knowledgeable about technology as Isaac and the protagonist of the film that moves the plot. The first encounter with the toy sees Kayla playing in an empty dining room, forced to watch a flirtatious waitress eat a glass in front of her. It’s an incredibly ugly scene, which automatically takes us to the neighborhood of torture we are in, much longer than we expected (there is a smell from the much higher Escape Room movies here that are firmly in the PG-13 world). But while the look is impressively visceral and well aware, the rest is a few steps back. It’s an overwhelmingly British film, shot in London with local actors (there’s an appearance booked by Eddie Marsan, with the soap opera Angela Griffin appearing), which takes place strangely in an anonymous US town, forcing everyone to laugh at Ay -meh- reek-uhn pronunciations. It’s a confusing mistake, clearly made for commercial reasons, that adds a layer of amateurism to what was otherwise a consistently directed first film about Britain’s Toby Meakins. He doesn’t quite take advantage of his reality-changing game sequences (Englund’s voice camera reminds us how wild Wes Craven made these nightmares so long ago), but he’s a bit above the Netflix genre average. The screenplay, by TV writer Simon Allen, works mostly as a small frame for the game’s scenes, which fortunately arrive quite often. The peculiarities of the plot have little to no real meaning, even at this moment, but this will not matter much to the sleeping crowd, which will be very distracted by the ugly noise of all. Do not you understand how a malicious curse is related to the game code? Who cares, here’s a teenager eating his arm! In a choice between consistency and toughness, it’s an easy win.
