When I heard that Jeff Wadlow was directing another horror movie, I was pumped. His Cry Wolf is one of my genre favorites, a subversive and meta flick that has fun playing with itself and its audience through a story that -- you guessed it -- involves a game. Naturally another film based on a game was going to be fabulous, right?
Then came the super spooky trailer, and I couldn't stop talking about it. The idea is that a group of friends gets lured into playing a game of Truth or Dare -- in an exotic location by a handsome stranger -- and things start getting weird. After they resume their lives back home, they realize that a supernatural force is haunting and hunting them through the game. Tell a lie and you die. Don't do the dare and you die. Refuse to play and you die. How bloody creepy is that? It's a meditation on the sadistic nature of peer pressure and games that transgress anxieties in social situations. If you can't dig that, you're wrong.
One problem. My advice: Keep watching the trailer and don't bother seeing the movie. It's like The Apparition or Ouija in that way. Whoever made the trailer is genius; whoever made the film is not.
It's not all bad, either. When you compare this to the endless new films in cinemas every week, it's a fun little flick. And as a genre lover, I'd rather watch this than some tepid romance about a girl who falls in love but can't go out into the sunlight. Truth or Dare has enough icky death scenes and tense narrative propulsion that I don't regret going to see it. And the story's concept is still writhing around in the back of my mind with pleasure.
I just can't help but wish it had been more satisfying. The primary problem is with its screenplay, which was apparently written by committee. It's flat and concerns flat characters who become little more than bodies to be disposed of. When it tries to go for depth -- when the characters learn the origin of the game and attempt to end it -- it quickly scales the ladder of absurdity. The mystery and suspense is cast aside in favor of rote plotting: The game has been haunted by a demon. It was summoned by a former nun in an old mission as an attempt to stop a lecherous priest from preying on children. To stop the demon and lift the curse, (SPOILER ALERT) the person who freed the demon must recite a Spanish prayer in the ancient mission, cut out their tongue, and seal it in a specific clay pot with wax.
Really?
I could go along with all that nonsense, maybe, if it was executed well. Unfortunately, the most compelling thing for me was watching the attractive-but-largely-talentless cast butcher themselves one by one. Nobody is likable, everyone does incredibly stupid things, and the screenplay doesn't account for plot hole after plot hole. Add to this the film's apparently desperate desire to remain squarely PG-13 when a hard R would have suited its material better. The camera looks away from the most exciting moments, the film edits out the shots we're desperate to see. Low budget moviemaking or no, there's really no excuse for pandering to a market. Not in a horror extravaganza.
And the final scene is so laughably silly that I probably would have walked out of the movie if it hadn't been the last scene.
Go see it, or don't. It's a silly, fun time. I'd recommend it for a lazy afternoon on a rainy day if you have nothing whatsoever to do, as long as you Redbox it and don't pay much.
IMDb: Truth or Dare
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