As I continue to avoid reviewing the (currently) last chapter of the Insidious franchise, let's instead look at the latest bloodless teen horror from Blumhouse, Truth or Dare. My brother actually saw the trailer for this and thought that it "looked good", apparently believing that they couldn't have put all the key plot points in the trailer... could they?
And people tell me I'm idealistic.
A group of college students, including the almost-saintly Olivia and her bff Markie, hed to Mexico for spring break. On the last night of their trip, after a week of hard drinking and partying, they meet Carter who invites them all to an abandoned mission to play a game of "Truth or Dare". The game isn't as innocent as it appears, however, and once they're all back home they find that the game has followed them, and become considerably more deadly. The rules are simple - you tell the truth or die; you do the dare or die, and you cannot refuse to do either, or you'll die. The body count starts to rise, and uncomfortable secrets start being revealed as the group are forced to play, whether they want to or not. Olivia and her remaining friends decide that the only way to beat this game is to find out how it began, and so it becomes a race against time to discover its origins and put a stop to the game, before the game finishes and they are all dead...
There are a great many things wrong with Truth or Dare, but before I get into them I suppose I should say what I actually liked about the film. So... I liked the character and subplot involving the gay guy and his overbearing and (allegedly) homophobic cop father. That was actually pretty good and would have had a nice payoff if they'd spent more than five minutes scattered throughout the whole film on it, and not ruined it with a "shock" plot twist about 3/4ths of the way through the film. So there you go: it's not all bad.
And now onto the meat. First of all, if you've seen the trailer you've seen most of the film - or at least all the important parts. I don't know why more and more films - particularly teen horror films - are doing this now, because all it does is make most of its audience annoyed that they wasted money on a film when they could have saved the time and cash by just going onto YouTube. Hell, I'm annoyed, and the film was essentially free for me as I've got a cinema card and already saw three films already this month, so any films after that are on the house. The trailer's got most of the big "truth" reveals and two of the big "money shot" dare consequences, and most of what wasn't shown in the trailer is little more than insipid filler. There's no real tension because we can easily figure out who's going to survive and who's not, and without tension, a horror film is effectively toothless, unless you've got some good gore.
...which leads neatly into the next complaint - it's bloodless. Utterly bloodless. The worst scene in the whole movie is the bit in the trailer where Markie has to break Olivia's hand with a hammer, and that's a blunt injury so no blood. Oh, and there's another scene where blood seeps out from under a door, but we don't actually see anything for more than a split second. There's actually a scene where a character slits their own throat, and they not only didn't give us any CGI blood, they didn't even bother with a CGI wound, so it looks like they died from a terminal case of razor burn. I just can't decide if it's a terrible case of lazy filmmaking or a particularly egregious example of why studios should stop trying to sanitise horror films so they can market them to teens. The only other "scary" string to the movie's bow is the Joker smiles people get when they're taken over by the game or what-have-you, and even that's not particularly impressive because, really, the last people to actually look creepy with that face were Heath Ledger and Cameron Monaghan, and everyone else is just riding their coattails.
And then there's the characters. They come in three varieties: unlikeable cannon fodder, insipid cliches and my favourite character, the gay guy. One character is so unpleasant I'm pretty sure he was a sociopath; another was clearly there just so he could die and the audience wouldn't feel bad, and the "love interest" had the IQ of a can of tuna, deciding to play the game while they're nearly finished stopping it. And our protagonist, Olivia, wears her character arc on her forehead almost from the movie's start. She volunteers for Habitat for Humanity! She gives money to homeless people! She always puts others before herself! It couldn't be clearer that she's going to end up effectively doing a heel turn unless they put it in flashing text in the trailer.
Truth or Dare is really not worth the money to see it. I'm sure there are some people out there who might enjoy it, but the vast majority are just going to go away feeling frustrated and cheated. I wouldn't even dare someone to go see it... unless there's a director's cut out there with more screen time given to Brad, the gay guy. I'd watch that.
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