Gerald’s Game (2017) Review

I’ve been away from reviewing for a couple of months now for various reasons all of which are too boring to go into! Anyway I’m back now and hopefully I’ll be posting up a few reviews over the coming weeks, so if you want something to watch over Christmas then you’re in the right place to at least get an idea.

Recently Netflix has started to excel with their TV shows, bringing to life some great Marvel characters, giving us the utterly wonderful Stranger Things and quite a few more. There’s also the odd film that pops up on there but I’ve never really watched many of them, however with this being a Stephen King book and having an interesting premise it was worth a punt.

Director – Mike Flanagan

Writers – Mike Flanagan and Jeff Howard, based on novel by Stephen King

Stars – Carla Gugino, Bruce Greenwood, Carel Struycken and Henry Thomas.

Run Time – 103 minutes

IMDB.com Link

Jessie and Gerald decide their failing marriage needs to be spiced up, so go off to their cabin in the woods to try and make things more exciting. Don’t worry though it’s not a cabin in the woods like the film of the same name or the one in Evil Dead or the several hundred other horrors based around secluded cabins. This one is a genuinely nice place, on their way they see a stray dog and this worries Jessie but all Gerald wants to do is get to the place and bang his wife.

Once there they try to make thing romantic but Jessie decides to feed the stray dog some steak that’s worth hundreds of dollars. After feeding the dog the wonderful steak Gerald’s gets Jessie and they head to the bedroom, it’s here that things take a nasty turn. Instead of the usually fluffy and cute handcuffs, Gerald has some proper metal ones. He cuffs Jessie to the bed and whacks a couple of Viagra down his throat and goes to “work”

However Gerald isn’t the man he once was, he’s ageing and mid sex he suffers a heart attack and falls down dead. Leaving Jessie cuffed and alone with seemingly no escape, after feeding the dog she’d left the door open, it was filmed so obviously for something to happen later on it was painful. Turns out that something was the dog coming in and trying to munch on her husband’s corpse.

That’s not the worse thing though as she starts to trip out talking to her dead husband as he chats back. She’s forced to face some terrible things from her past and she’s forced to try and take action or to just lay back and die. Obviously it’d be a boring film if she just lay there and died, now I’ve seen a lot of people that weren’t keen on the ending of this film but I loved it. In fact it saved the film from being just average and turned it into a decent movie, just as things were starting to get a little boring the ending really made it an enjoyable experience.

The Good

• I might be a bit bias as I love Carla Gugino, I think she was fantastic in this movie all the way through.
• I love a story that has a limited cast and is mostly set in one place, this delivers on both accounts. Along with Gugino being fantastic, Bruce Greenwood is very strong as Gerald.
• There’s not many SFX but there’s a nasty one with Jessie’s hand as she tries to escape the cuffs.

The Bad

• Delving into Jessie’s past was a bit strange and I wasn’t hugely impressed with those scenes at all.
• A few obvious hints as to what will happen are dotted around and although they are few in number they are painfully obvious.

The Inbetween

• The ending, I loved it and as I mentioned it took the film from languishing in averageness to being well worth a watch.

I think this movie is well worth some of your time, if you’re bored one night and want something to give a watch to then this is worth considering. It was never going to be a classic or anything but it’s strong acting and in my opinion, a great end make it well worth spending time watching.

Overall Rating – 7/10

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