TRUTH OR DARE (2017)

Studio:       Syfy
Director:    Nick Simon
Writer:       Thommy Hutson, Ethan Lawrence
Producer:  Lisa Hansen
Stars:     Cassie Scerbo, Brytni Sarpy, Mason Dye, Harvey Guillen, Luke Baines, Ricardo Hoyos, Alexxis Lemire, Christina Masterson, Heather Langenkamp

Review Score:

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Summary:

Eight friends end up targeted for horrible deaths after playing a supernatural game of Truth or Dare inside a haunted house.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

1983 – Donna Boone urges her friend Johnny to jump off a house’s roof to satisfy a Truth or Dare condition. Johnny slips and falls to his death before completing the dare.

Donna returns inside the house to find a dare written on a mirror telling her to pour acid on her head. Donna covers her head with a paste made from baking soda before doing the dare.

Present Day – Carter Boyle welcomes his friends Tyler Pemhart, Tyler’s girlfriend Alex Colshis, Alex’s best friend Maddie Sotarez, Luke Wyler, Luke’s girlfriend Jessie Havnell, Holt Thorne, and Addison Troy to a house he found on scaryrentals.com for a Halloween outing. Carter explains that the property, Charun House, became haunted after seven teens played Truth or Dare in 1983 and all but one survivor died a horrible death.

Carter convinces everyone to play Truth or Dare by writing questions and dares on note cards. During the game, Maddie is forced to admit that she slept with Alex’s boyfriend Tyler.

Tyler angrily goes through the remaining cards, which now contain supernaturally written messages, and receives a dare to put his hands on a hot stove. When Tyler quits the game, a chair supernaturally knocks him across the kitchen and he painfully melts his hand on a hot stove.

A ghostly message on the TV tells the group that they have 48 hours to complete three rounds. The friends try to leave, but the doors and windows supernaturally trap everyone inside.

Additional dares force Jessie to eat Tyler’s burnt flesh, Holt to electrocute himself on loose wires, and Luke to have his knee smashed with a baseball bat.

When asked if she is a drug addict, Addison lies by saying no. Addison moves to leave the house, but is paranormally pushed off the porch and impaled.

The seven remaining friends regroup at the hospital. Carter tries explaining what happened, but the police disbelieve him.

The next day, Addison’s bloody ghost appears to Carter in his dorm room and dares him to hang himself. After receiving live video on their phones of Carter’s subsequent strangulation, Alex, Maddie, Tyler, and Holt race to Carter’s room. However, they arrive too late to save him. The four friends see a message that Round Two is beginning.

Alex researches the house’s haunted history. Alex, Maddie, Tyler, and Holt then go to see disfigured Donna Boone, the sole survivor from the 1983 deaths. Donna confirms the curse by explaining that the house’s demon feeds on fear and pain. Donna adds that the friends will have to finish the game inside the house if they wish to survive, but suggests sharing their dares in order to outsmart the demon.

Elsewhere, Luke receives a dare to rob a gas station using a gun that supernaturally appears in his bed. The cashier ends up killing Luke with a shotgun. Jessie phones Alex to report Luke’s fate. Alex tells Jessie to meet them back at the house.

Alex, Maddie, Tyler, Holt, and Jessie return to Charun House. Dares force the five friends to drink poison that they throw up using soda and compel Tyler and Maddie to each tear out a tooth with pliers. Tyler shoots himself in the head when the friends are dared to play Russian roulette.

Holt is dared to be run over by a car. Holt confesses to the others that he once paralyzed someone in a hit-and-run accident, but fled the scene and never faced punishment. With Jessie at the wheel, one of the vehicles outside paranormally drags Holt across the pavement before violently running him over.

Alex realizes that they are all being punished for their secret obsessions and sins. Dared to chain herself to a pipe in the cellar, Jessie ends up killed by a huge swarm of cockroaches.

Round Three begins. Maddie receives a phone call instructing the two remaining girls to remove seven living body parts. Alex and Maddie take turns removing an eyelash, hair, fingernail, earlobe, finger, toe, and finally Maddie’s foot.

While racing to the hospital, the message “kill her” appears on the dashboard GPS. Maddie implores Alex to do the dare. Alex buckles her seatbelt and speeds into a tree. The camera cuts to black. One of the girls is heard gasping after the car crashes.

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Click here for Culture Crypt's review of Blumhouse's Truth or Dare from 2018.

Review:

Just yesterday I happened to be editing my review of “Happy Death Day.”  In it, I praise the movie as a turning point for the typical Blumhouse teen thriller template, evolving from a hard focus on satisfying slumber-partying preteens to something with substance capable of capturing hardcore horror crowds too.

It’s an interesting coincidence that today, I found myself watching Syfy’s 2017 original “Truth or Dare,” because the film opts for an opposite direction, feeling regressively like a PG-13 Blumhouse production circa 2014.  It’s competently executed, yet not at all ambitious.  Characters are hollow to the point where stereotyping doesn’t even bother going all the way through the motions, though the target demo probably cares more about the pretty faces playing these thin roles anyway.  There also isn’t a single trope up the film’s sleeve that can’t be seen slipping out from a mile away, but that doesn’t immediately mean the movie can’t be enjoyed under appropriate circumstances.

There’s nothing outwardly awful about picking a formula, sticking to it, and intentionally aiming to please an undemanding audience with milquetoast mediocrity.  It’s just that acceptability thresholds for such strategies are thinning, and Syfy barely sneaks in under the wire while its competition experiences increased value from being bolder.

The above is more or less meant as a side note of mild disappointment.  After attempting something stylistic within the slasher subgenre in his previous outing “The Girl in the Photographs,” I would have preferred to see director Nick Simon continue keeping creativity a high priority.  Alas, professionals at this tier often don’t have the luxury to be choosy, so he and his team take a straight gig to do honest work on an uncomplicated project instead.  Maybe his aching artist’s eye explains why “Truth or Dare” at least ends up being an entertaining lark, even if it is largely derivative.

It’s party time for eight college kids looking for some frightful fun.  You know what that means.  Here comes an introductory montage of those friends driving to a haunted house they’ve rented for the Halloween holiday while vague pop rock pumps in the background.  And what would a predictable game of Truth or Dare be without two girls kissing and a revealed secret involving one girl who slept with her best friend’s boyfriend?

Things take a more interesting turn when an unseen demon traps everyone in the house and delivers his own dares via supernatural messages.  For the remaining 70 of its 90-minute duration, “Truth or Dare” becomes a TV movie reimagining of “Ouija” (review here) meets “Saw” as everyone mutilates themselves in a series of harrowing sequences, with each scene topping the last to see which one can induce the most eye-covering squirms.

Pliers to teeth, pliers to fingernails, burnt flesh, poison chugging, Russian roulette, and enough severed body parts to make Jigsaw dry heave are some of the tortures in store.  Tightening tension dares viewers to not look away as often as the demon dares the octet, pushing the boundaries of basic cable carnage further than any Syfy production has gone before.  “Truth or Dare” is shockingly visceral about its horror, which in this case turns out to be a double-edged machete.

“Truth or Dare” does evoke shades of “Hostel” and “Final Destination,” though its surrounding story and style are so serious, violence reads as oppressively bleak.  If ever a fright film needed a thick dollop of dark comedy or slick sarcasm to aerate the taste of its gore, this is it.  More disgusting than wickedly fun, the movie has a mean streak intention to put its characters through one Hell of a wringer without explaining why they deserve such gruesome deaths.

“Truth or Dare” doesn’t explain much of anything really.  “A Nightmare on Elm Street” icon Heather Langenkamp pops in for a single scene of Old Lady Exposition to simply confirm everything everyone already figured out about the curse.  A late revelation adds something about the dares being based on secret sins, although these obsessions aren’t spelled out for several of the folks serving as interchangeable fodder.

Thommy Hutson’s script more or less says, “heck with it” by sticking strictly to setting up each ordeal and leaving it at that.  Nick Simon then tasks the cast with following instructions to knock down those pins and reset for the next frame.  It’s a formula for standard scares that definitely gets a basic job done, and done well.  Just don’t expect to be bowled over by anything particularly original once “Truth or Dare” is all said and done, which was pretty much its plan all along.

Review Score:  60

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