A slice of dinner theater torture porn that attempts to mine the inner sadism of regular folks for squirm-inducing entertainment, Would You Rather comes across like a combination of Saw and 1995’s The Last Supper, but without any of the queasy delight that designation might connote. Scripted by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen as a twisted exploration of the titular party game, director David Guy Levy’s movie isn’t wickedly playful enough to qualify as a darkly comedic horror romp, a la the Final Destination movies, and it’s not coiled enough to succeed as a gritty work of macabre tension.

In the wake of her parents’ death, Iris (Brittany Snow) is struggling to make ends meet and also care for her younger brother, who needs a bone marrow transplant when her plight lands her an unusual invitation from a seemingly philanthropic aristocrat, Shepard Lambrick (a showy Jeffrey Combs, one of the movie’s weak links): come to exclusive dinner party and play a game where the winner will be awarded untold amounts of money, and have their life’s problems solved. Iris reluctantly accepts, and arrives at Lambrick’s mansion where she’s joined by Cal (Eddie Steeples), ex-gambler Peter (Robb Wells), sullen Amy (Sasha Grey, playing the Ally Sheedy role from The Breakfast Club), recovering alcoholic Conway (John Heard), wheelchair-bound Linda (June Squibb) and Iraq vet Travis (Charlie Hofheimer).

With the assistance of his henchman Bevans (Jonny Coyle) and depraved, unstable son Julian (Robin Lord Taylor, effectively loathsome), Lambrick sketches out the rules of his game: going around the table, each participant is given two fairly undesirable choices, one of which they must select within 15 seconds and then act upon. Car batteries, knives, whipping canes, firecrackers and other gruesome instruments are trotted out, and tears, arguments and blood-letting naturally ensues.

One of the main problems of Would You Rather is that Schlachtenhaufen’s screenplay doesn’t set up its subjects as convincingly desperate. Ergo, the collectivity of their immediately cowed nature — before the full parameters of the game are revealed, no one leaves when given the chance, even though some super-creepy and suspect stuff has gone down — rings false. The loose-cannon threat of Julian, also, who has major daddy issues, is too quickly resolved.

Mainly, though, Lambrick is just a terribly sketched villain, which snuffs out any flicker of intrigue this constrained narrative offers. In Saw, Jigsaw had a rationalized motivation — and indeed, what might be called an overarching worldview, which became more honed in the franchise’s sequels. In Would You Rather, apart from some half-reasoned mumbo-jumbo (“It’s all about decision-making in its rawest form!”) there’s not enough background to make one believe that Lambrick really gets his rocks off from this stuff, and has the ability to sustain such an enterprise, aides and all. Ergo, Combs’ performance — which comes across like some deranged game show host — isn’t rooted in any sort of reality.

Director Levy’s technical package, achieved on a modest budget, convincingly imparts a claustrophobic vibe, but can’t overcome spotty casting and the inherent limitations of the material as rendered — which peaks about 40 minutes in, and then coasts across the finish line with an ever-diminishing level of cleverness and execution. In addition to its theatrical engagements at the Laemmle NoHo 7 and elsewhere, Would You Rather is also available via digital download and VOD, across various platforms. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (IFC Films, R, 93 minutes)

Director Werner Herzog has lived life as a sort of cinematic pirate, striking out to and fro, and using the medium of film more often than not to satisfy his immense, globe-spanning curiosities, in both narrative features (Fitzcarraldo, Rescue Dawn) and documentaries (Cave of Forgotten Dreams). A stirring meditation on the human spirit in extreme conditions, and a work of a certain piece with his nonfiction explorations Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World, Herzog and Russian co-director Dmitry Vasyukov’s Happy People: A Year in the Taiga delves into the lives of trappers and indigenous peoples living around Bakhtia, a remote town of 300 in the wintry plains of Siberia.

An unforgiving expanse one-and-a-half times the size of the United States, where a temperature of 30 degrees below zero Fahrenheit is considered a mild day in the winter, the Siberian Taiga is reachable only by helicopter or boat. The movie centers mostly on Gennady, a middle-aged trapper who oversees a 900-square-mile parcel of land, consigned to him during communist times, where he clears snow from his main cabin and outpost dwellings, splits wood to make skis, strips birch tree bark to make a homemade mosquito repellent, and constructs and sets 1,000 traps during the springtime months — all using techniques passed down for many generations.

Happy People was originally birthed by Vasyukov, who, not terribly unlike the filmmakers of Restrepo, lived for over a year with his subjects in remote Siberia, in order to craft a four-hour work for Russian television that captured and celebrated this fading way of life. This film represents Herzog’s edit of that, but it’s no mere unthinking abridgement. Anchored by a characteristically ruminative voiceover from the filmmaker, Happy People also reflects Herzog’s passion and fascination for the often unforgiving nature of the wild.

The footage itself is fascinating, but more in line with something like Interview Project or Darwin: No Services Ahead than the willful aesthetic remove of Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s minimalist Sweetgrass. Vasyukov and Herzog have a keen, intuitive grasp of when to let this material speak mostly for itself — as with the construction of a wooden canoe by one of the last indigenous persons trained in the craft — and when and where to interweave Gennady’s ruminations on his work and life, and its relationship to something like domesticated farming (“In the wild an animal knows that no good can come from me, from man — here, it’s about who outsmarts whom”).

Living in such extreme conditions is part of its story, but Happy People also highlights the dignifying effects that nature has on humans. In this sense, the film’s surprising emotional scope is as expansive as its setting. It’s a mesmerizing portrait of human resilience, but a reminder as well that we remain tethered to the natural world, despite our increasingly wireless existence in a digital age. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Music Box Films, unrated, 94 minutes)