Truth Or Dare is another Blumhouse movie that involves a group of students going on Spring Break, making some bad decisions, and having bad things happen to them. It's a formula that has been recycled thousands of times, but I still love movies like this. I have a real soft spot for Teen Horror involving groups of ludicrously hot adolescents played by actors in their thirties getting themselves into perilous situations, armed only with witty dialogue and gratuitous sex scenes.
SPOILER ALERT
Truth Or Dare instantly appealed to me because the trailer ticked all of the right boxes. Where I think it succeeds is that it has an original idea, as in a demon possessing a game of truth or dare, mixed in with lots of stereotypical Horror concepts borrowed from other movies, giving it a very familiar feel. A super-hot cast didn't hurt either.
Truth Or Dare starts with a group of students celebrating Spring Break in Mexico. The lead character meets a strange guy at a party, and he persuades her and her friends to go up to an abandoned church. After a few drinks he suggests a game of Truth or Dare, and when it comes to his turn to play and tell the truth, he tells the other participants that the game is real and that if they don't play or if they lie, they will die.
Before the game, one of them took a photo of the whole group, and it transpires that they are selected by a demon to play the game in the order that they are in on the photograph. This is very reminiscent of the first Final Destination movie. The fact that they are tricked into playing this 'real' version of Truth or Dare and the curse is effectively passed on, also reminds me of the more recent movie, It Follows.
Truth Or Dare is far from perfect. Firstly, it's just not particularly scary. I felt that the story could have worked a little better with some more frightening scenes, and even some elaborate or sickening death scenes. That's one of the ways movies like this thrill the audience. Back to the Final Destination franchise again, no-one gives a fuck about whether someone's going to die or not, it's the complex, brutal and imaginative way that they get killed off that entertains. Truth Or Dare's death scenes were sadly unfulfilling.
There were also countless plot holes. These movies are usually full of them, but it seldom matters. If Truth Or Dare delivered some more twisted dares and deaths, the plot-holes would have mattered even less. However, the writing was a little sloppy in places
As far as the positives go, Truth Or Dare is both
well paced and a lot of fun to watch. It churns out the Horror clichés with a
sense of joyous celebration, and falls nicely into the category of
'entertaining trash'. In fairness, that's all I really wanted from the movie
and that's what I got. Overall, it did make for a pretty cool viewing, but I
felt that it could have been way better than it actually was.
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