E's Reviews: Blumhouse's Truth Or Dare

So I got “dared” (ha ha...sigh) to see this movie. I actually put up a mini poll asking for 5 of our followers to decide if I should review it since I had no plans for this week’s review. I got a response almost immediately. After much deliberation, I caved and decided to go ahead and see the movie, even after reading about how horrible it was. Luckily, I got to see it on a “buy one get one” ticket night and saw it at the local Alamo Drafthouse.

Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare stars Lucy Hale of ‘Pretty Little Liars’ fame as Olivia, Tyler Posey of ‘MTV’s Teen Wolf’ as Lucas, Violett Beane as Olivia’s BFF Markie, Sophia Ali as Penelope, Nolan Gerard Funk as Tyson, Landon Liboiron as Carter, Sam Lerner as Ronnie, and Hayden Szeto as Brad.

The film follows this young group of college students as they head to Mexico for their last spring break together before “real life” sets in. The opening credits show the gang partying, enjoying the beaches and clubs and bars that Monterrey has to offer young spring breakers. On the last night of their stay in Mexico, however, Olivia meets Carter, a relatively handsome young man who convinces the group that instead of ending their last night in their hotel room, they should come party with him at some mysterious location. This is basically when all Hell breaks loose. Carter leads the friends to an abandoned convent and persuades them to play a game of truth or dare. It begins innocently enough, but when Carter’s turn is up and he chooses truth, he reveals that the game is real, and if you do not answer the truth or do the dare, you die. Initially, the friends don’t believe Carter, but when they start seeing things, hearing things, and start dying one after another, you bet your butts they start believing the game is evil, and is coming for them.

Now, I went into this movie with relatively low expectations. It’s a PG-13 horror flick, with a young, popular cast of actors and actresses. It’s the kind of movie that would come out during spring break to put teens in the seats at movie theaters. I was sort of expecting another disaster like ‘Ouija’, another Blumhouse production that I reviewed for Horrible Horror Fridays and absolutely hated. Amazingly enough, I didn’t hate Truth or Dare. Here are some reasons why I liked it (and why I think you will, too).

For starters, the cast is great. They’re each dedicated to their roles and their characters. Each one of them gives a great performance, particularly Hayden Szeto, Tyler Posey, and Lucy Hale. I wanted to see more of Sam Lerner’s ‘Ronnie’ as he was the sole comic relief in the group and that’s something I wished I could’ve seen more of. Next, the camera work I found to be pretty good, no shaky cam or bad angles took me out of the film or distracted me. The score was pretty good, too. The jump scares were few and far between (I think I jumped once) and it was a breath of fresh air to see that in horror these days. The story itself was solid, with a clear antagonist which I found to be amusing in nature, but also pretty horrible to our group of heroes. Going back to the cast, I actually cared for a couple of the characters. I didn’t hate them, or want them to die. I actually wanted them to win, even Nolan Gerard Funk’s douchey Tyson.

Now for the bad. There was literally nothing scary about this movie. Sure, it’s got a supernatural twist to a classic kid’s game, and the demon to go along with it, but I didn’t feel like anything in the movie was scary. At times I got a chill or two because of the strange faces or the things the characters were seeing or experiencing, and I recoiled once at one particular scene involving a dare about walking on a roof...but other than that, I wasn’t thrilled or on the edge of my seat. I actually laughed a few times during the film, which was surprising. The goofy faces people made when the demon temporarily possessed someone to ask a character “truth or dare?” made me giggle. Then there’s a backstory with Markie and her dad’s suicide that really didn’t feel meaningful for this film. It didn’t fit and I got annoyed at the movie for this reason. It just felt like they kept shoving this story at us to kind of show off Olivia and Markie’s strained relationship and how it was dissolving before our eyes. I didn’t need to see any of that and it almost ruined the entire film for me.

In the end, Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare is a decent spring horror film. I was entertained and even with it’s shortcomings and simple story, was fun to watch. It felt like it was self aware that it wanted to be a silly film with a silly premise and that it was meant to have fun with. I highly recommend you catch it in theaters.

Score: 6.5/10