It’s a trio of films about video games that kill if you make one wrong decision.
DEADWARE (2021)
This film only runs 68-minute long, and it feels like another one of those lockdown projects from the COVID years. The entire film consists of two people in computer screen windows on a video chat.
However, here’s the catch. It’s supposed to be 1999, this guy and girl are long distance friends, and they are just experiencing the modern technology of webcams for the first time.
And then they decide to play an online point-and-click horror video game.
This is fun for video game fans and nostalgia freaks who were around back when survival horror, online gaming, and the internet just began booming, but as a horror movie there’s not much going on here. You mostly feel like you’re watching two people as they play a game that keeps spooking them.
Elements of the game they’re playing give winks to Resident Evil (the entrance hall to the mansion, the use of a typewriter), and there are live action video clips that most definitely pay homage to The Blair Witch Project, which happened to have come out in 1999, but overall, not a lot goes on here, and if you’ve been around the horror genre for any length of time, you know exactly where this is heading.
LIVESCREAM (2018)
Running only 70 minutes long, this film is strictly for gamers, and more specifically old school gamers. The premise is fun, but because it’s a low budget movie, it’s virtually free of any actors with almost all deaths being presented by a “has left the chat” notice.
The entire story is told through a guy who streams his video game screen (on the right) and streams his reactions while he’s playing (top left) as viewers comment in a scrolling chat (bottom left). This movie is not for the easily distracted.
Yet somehow I made it through…
I was definitely feeling the nostalgia. The dude’s icon for his stream is clearly a PS1 controller. His screams as he runs around scary locations totally echo mine when I play survival horror games. And the graphics in the games he plays go as far back as looking like they’re from the NES days in the late 80s.
I was sort of hyped during a moment when a grid of his viewers popped up on screen and one of them was actually killed off for us to see, but that was the only time. After that, it’s all a matter of usernames signed onto the chat board just “exiting” when the game player dies in the game. And that’s the plot. When the player dies in the game, one of his viewers does. And the catch is they can’t sign off.
Considering we don’t see any of the kills, this film becomes repetitive. It would have worked better as a shorter film…or a full-length if it featured on screen video chat kills. So you decide if you feel that it’s worth sitting through watching a guy play a horror game and anonymous viewers “leaving the chat” one by one.
CHOOSE OR DIE (2021)
A horror movie about a text-based “choose your own adventure” video game from the 80s? I’m so in.
It begins with an older man (oh shit, he’s my age) playing the game and discovering it not only turns on Gary Numan music to set the tone (awesome), it also makes you pick one of two horrible choices that comes to fruition in reality once you’ve made your selection.
Then we meet a young woman who scores a dusty old copy of the game from her buddy and gets sucked into its insanity. There are some great, suspenseful scenes of her getting loved ones into horrible predicaments in a game she can’t escape while being forced to make moral decisions.
Of course she and her buddy have to delve into how this video game came into being (very The Ring). Considering I recently popped in a Blu-ray I bought in 2011 and it no longer works, yet the VHS tape, TV, and VCR the friends in this movie find in a dusty old warehouse where the video game was made forty years ago all work, it was a harsh reminder that they just don’t make things the way they used to.
While the final act almost feels like it’s jumping the shark, it’s so fantastically whacked that it was kind of the perfect ending. My only gripe? The leading girl dares to say, “Fuck the eighties!” I was so rooting for the game to kill her by that point.
