Julien Neaves – Editor
Sometimes I’m in the mood for some junk food. I know it’s not good but I know I will enjoy eating it. That applies to my movie appetite as well. Sometimes I want a light, low investment movie just to kick back and relax with. So when I saw Netflix dropped supernatural horror film Truth or Dare it looked like a good old junk food movie. Well I was half right.
Truth or Dare tells the story of six American friends partying in Mexico who decide to follow a shady guy to an even more shady looking old building and they play a round of the shady party game truth or dare. But then shady guy tells them the game is real and runs off. When the friends return to the States they begin having creepy visions of people asking them “truth or dare” and they learn if they don’t play or cheat they will be dead as a door nail.
Now admittedly the set up for the film is very silly. A killer game of truth of dare? I wonder how long it took to come up with that banger of an idea. And it’s a Blumhouse horror movie so you have a 50/50 chance that the movie will be a heaping pile of poo. But in watching the film they had me interested during the first act. The contorted, demonic faces looked creepy and they are easily the best aspect of the film. And a couple of the early deaths had some ingenuity to them. But as the deaths progressed they got more and more pedestrian when they should have been over-the-top gory spectacles. Have they never seen a Final Destination movie? And the rules of the game keep changing making things unnecessarily convoluted. In these types of movies you have got to keep it simple, stupid!
Lucy Hale plays the lead character Olivia Barron with all the emotional depth of a puddle after a light drizzle. And like her role in the abysmal Fantasy Island she does little more than look scared and show off her midriff. Tyler Posey from MTV’s Teen Wolf is here too but he has very little to work with. And other than the token gay guy all the other characters are either flat or just plain unlikable, so I didn’t give a flying fig whether any of them lived or died. Mind you Truth or Dare is not unique in that respect, but at least some other budget horror flicks can keep you entertained.
And you would think at least the final act would end the movie with a bang but it was more like a wet fart. Man, the way this movie ended was so insultingly absurd that it made me go from disliking the characters to actively loathing them.
The version I saw was the director’s cut which makes me wonder if the theatrical version could have been even more banal. But the movie made major bank at the box office so a sequel is pretty much inevitable. Let’s hope they do a better job than the original because if you ask me (and by reading this review you kinda are) Truth or Dare is really not worth your time. The movie, not the game that is. What you do in your personal time is none of my business.
Julien’s Score: 4 out of 10
For Sommer’s review of Fantasy Island you can click here. And for more entertaining and truthful film reviews I dare you to like and follow Redmangoreviews on Facebook by clicking here.
Julien “Jules” Neaves is a TARDIS-flying, Force-using Trekkie whose bedroom stories were by Freddy Krueger, learned to be a superhero from Marvel, but dreams of being Batman. I love promoting Caribbean film (Cariwood), creating board games and I am an aspiring author. I say things like “12 flavours of awesome sauce”.
I can also be found posting on Instagram as redmanwriter and talking about TV and movie stuff on Facebook at Movieville.
This one truly sucked a big fat hairy goose egg! There’s actually another horror movie, courtesy the SyFy channel called Truth or Dare. A smaller budget but it was tons better than this mess.
Ok. I’ll see if I can find it.