Directed by Marcus Graves. Starring Katheryn Winnick, Kevin Pollak, Bruce Dern, Richard Short, Nicholas Tucci. Horror, 100 mins. Certificate 18 Horror.

RRP £15.99. Release Date January 17th 2011.

You wont take long to figure out which particular cash-cow horror franchise is being gratuitously milked by the blandly workmanlike CHOOSE. We reckon approximately 3 minutes at the longest. In the prologue, a teenage girl is given 60 seconds to choose either her mom or dad to be horribly killed, or else the hooded intruder in their house will kill the entire family. We’re in son-of SAW territory, for sure, with subsequent victims facing similar sadistic dilemmas for set pieces that are pitched somewhere between the James Wong movie and SE7EN, which remains hugely influential over 15 years since its release. The enduring power of the latter hovers over one sequence in which a pianist has to choose between his ears and his fingers.

Kevin Pollak, who isn’t the only one on screen here with Could Do Better written all over his face, adds some welcome, earthy charisma as the veteran cop on the case though the script keeps either forgetting he exists or neglecting to give him any juicy lines. His Nancy Drew-esque daughter is played by Katheryn Winnick, who’s carving herself a niche in (straight to DVD) horror films though has still yet to improve on Jeff Lieberman’s subversive Halloween-set black comedy SATAN‘S LITTLE HELPER. She fills out a sweater better than anyone else on screen this year as a college student with Dead Mom Back-story Issues, and handily she keeps relevant newspaper clippings to allow for smoother exposition.

CHOOSE is a depressingly humdrum picture - neither fish nor fowl and spectacularly unambitious in every sense. Like too many genre movies of recent years, it is content to rely on bathroom-mirror scares and hand-on-shoulder fake jolts in the absence of anything genuinely scary or atmospheric. Worse still, it’s not even true to its own rip-off sub-genre : the gore is played way too discreet considering the audience that was evidently intended. The movie’s cluelessness with the exploitation elements is reflected by Winnick taking unnecessary baths and showers that offer no bare flesh.

The script falls back on dumb contrivances, like the secondary character who dresses just like the killer for the purpose of hokey misdirection - reminiscent of URBAN LEGEND, in which everyone seemed to possess a Parka just for the sake of confusing the Very Dumb. It also gets bogged down with the uncinematic use of the Internet. Memo to Future Genre Filmmakers - I.M. chat may move the plot along but it aint very exciting to watch. If you stay the course, you do get Bruce Dern in a key exposition role and a Double Twisteroo climax, though there’s no denying it : “Scarlip”, as played by Nicolas Tucci, is an unimpressive addition to the endless roster of Jigsaw-wannabes.

Steven West.

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