TRUTH OR DARE -- DVD Review by Porfle

 

Originally posted on 8/23/18

 

How exhilarating it is these days to encounter a full-blooded horror thriller that yanks you up out of your seat and whisks you along like a carnival ride before coming to a crashing halt and leaving you dazed and breathless.

That, my horror-friendly friends, is TRUTH OR DARE (2017), one of the most exciting, nailbiting, and just all-around fun genre flicks I've seen in a goon's age.

Oh sure, it starts out just like one of those standard stalker-slasher yarns about a group of annoying young people who drive to some secluded house for the weekend to party and end up being terrorized by something or someone.

I was all ready to settle in for the same old familiar hijinx and see if this one was going to be so-bad-it's-good or just plain bad.  In fact, I seem to have developed a fondness for such trash over the years and usually derive at least some amount of fun from watching it.

Here, we get the usual group of various teen-types in the big, creepy house, spending Halloween night getting drunk, scaring each other, and playing the titular game which, as you might suspect, dredges up some unpleasant truths (such as infidelity in the ranks) and puts certain members of the group at odds with one another.

But what these hapless kids don't suspect is that there's an evil entity inside that house, and it likes to play the game too--only it plays it for real. Which means that those cryptic, crudely-scrawled "dares" which start to turn up everywhere ("smash your knee", "burn your hands on the stove", etc.) must be followed to the letter within an alotted time, or else.

The "or else" is what gives TRUTH OR DARE its most potent shocks and thrills, with our stalwart protagonists--who actually develop into real people that we care about--getting wise to the seriousness of it all and scrambling (to borrow a line from the script) to "do the dare before the dare does you."

This leads to a frantic succession of horrific acts including self-mutilation, cannibalism (a vegan is forced to devour her friend's freshly-charred scar tissue), and other atrocities that grow in magnitude until I was literally cringing with dread at what they'd be "dared" to next.  Just when one dare seems unfairly extreme, the next one goes it one better on the horror scale until such things as hanging and dismemberment come into play.

As I said, we really do start to care about these characters and their plight, which makes the story all the more effective.  Taking a tip from an aging survivor of the game from years back (NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET's Heather Langenkamp in a welcome cameo), they begin to help each other get through the dares, sharing the burden equally whenever possible so that all might have a chance to make it past the final round.

But the game is always ahead of them, and each successive horror is enough to have guys like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft nodding in amusement and approval.  Langenkamp's presence is especially appropriate since NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET is one of the last teen-oriented horror flicks that I remember enjoying this much.

The film looks great and is sharply directed by Nick Simon (REMOVAL, THE GIRL IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS) for maximum effect, with a uniformly fine cast.  Standouts include Cassandra Scerbo as Alex, Brytni Sarpy as Maddie, and Mason Dye as Tyler, whose volatile romantic triangle will be one of the key factors in the dares.  Surprisingly, this is a made-for-TV movie that premiered on the SyFy Channel, blowing away most of their other original fare.

Am I praising TRUTH OR DARE too highly? Perhaps, but I'm simply basing my comments about it on how I felt at the fadeout, which managed to be open-ended while still delivering a slam-bang finish.  It left me excited, impressed, jazzed, wrung-out, and feeling as though I'd just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl.  For a modern-day horror film in a sub-genre known for its frequent mediocrity, that'll do just fine.

Format: Color, NTSC, Widescreen
Language: English
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
Number of discs: 1
Not Rated
Captions: none
Studio: Cinedigm
DVD Release Date: September 4, 2018
Run Time: 90 minutes
Extras: none

Buy it at Amazon.com