Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Blumhouse have worked with such names as Spike Lee, James Wan, Jordan Peele Mike Flanagan and M. Night Shyamalan and had a major hand in getting such films as BlacKkKlansman, Get Out and Whiplash brought to the screen. I say this because after watching throwback teen horror Truth Or Dare, it’s genuinely tough to marry up a studio that’s also racked up such noteworthy franchises as Insidious, Paranormal Activity and The Purge with the sort of underachieving bilge we see here. In the studio’s defence, it’s business model has always been fairly sound – bang out a high concept chiller on a low, low budget and if it hits, you’ve made yourself quite a pretty penny – but in the case of Jeff Wadlow’s profit spinning Truth Or Dare, I’m genuinely suspicious if it’s audience was also dared by a malevolent evil spirit to show up and buy tickets for a story that’s been done far better both before and since.
Doe-eyed goody two shoes Olivia Barron is all set to spend her spring break building houses for Habitat for Humanity, but before she goes, she’s convinced to actually spend a little time on herself by her best friend Markie who invites her to join their friends to blow off some steam in Mexico. As the group parties, we find that each of them all seemingly have private hang ups that surely can’t suddenly become relevant later in the film (could they?), but as we breeze past the odd spot of foreshadowing with an unfaithful girlfriend here and a closeted gay there, the party shifts gears when a random guy at the bar proposes something oddly radical.
Travelling to an abandoned church on the say of newcomer Carter, the group play truth or dare, with some of the snarkier members of the friend start hinting that among this cadre of students lurk some mighty dark secrets – but they’re nowhere near as dark as the evil force that lurks within the old building. Once they’ve all played, Carter admits that he’s set them up and a mischievous spirit that’s possessed the game will now come for them and ask them the titular question – truth or dare. If you refuse to play, fail the dare or lie, you forfit your life, but as Olivia and her friends are about to find out, playing along can also have some pretty severe consequences too as every deep, dark and uncomfortable secret they have gets dredged up to the surface like a particularly spiteful episode of Jerry Springer.
As this demon enjoys itself thoroughly by forcing its puppets to spill some pretty spicy tea, the group’s numbers inevitably dwindle and the race is on to try and figure out how to cancel the curse before the curse cancels them. Can the friendship of the remainder of the group remain intact long enough to figure this all out, or will the demon ramp up it’s dares to the point where no one can possibly win?
It becomes fairly obvious very early on that Truth Or Dare is playing by some very standard horror rules. The plot is basically every movie that you’ve ever seen that requires a bunch of kids fucking around with an ancient spirit and thus instantly reap the whirlwind. There’s aspects of being able to catch a paranormal curse like it’s some sort of freaky illness like The Ring, the plot is kicked off by an asshole actively passing the evil on to a good hearted teen much like It Follows and soon we’re being giving rules of how the antisocial force operates and what order it assaulting the cast in which feels incredibly like Final Destination without the budget sapping opening premonition – so far, so derivative. However, it’s also pretty telling that Truth Or Dare suffers in comparison to movies that came later that seemed to copy it. For example, there’s plenty that’s included in the movie that cropped up wholesale in both Smile movies that goes well beyond just predominantly featuring images of possessed people beaming from ear to ear; in fact you could even argue that Truth Or Dare and Smile 2 have two extremely very spiritually similar pay-offs. However, while Smile should really come off worse as it came out after (and thus looks a bit bereft of originality) Parker Finn’s grin obsessed epics bury Jeff Wadlow’s flick fairly easily and it’s mostly down to tone.
It may have helped it earn at the box office, but Truth Or Dare’s relentless pandering to a teen audience manages to undercut virtually every scene it has by talking down to it’s audience. It’s a shame, because lurking within some deeply uninteresting kills and a group of characters that garner absolutely no sympathy, there’s something of a timely story embedded that has something to say about the niceties we all endure to ensure we all actually keep our friends.
There’s a fair amount of heft to this idea that actually bleeds out into subplots concerning a gay character terrified to come out to his father, an amoral med student who sells prescriptions and a whole messy batch of unsaid things about the suicide of Markie’s father, but any weight these ideas may have had are bludgeoned to death by a script that seems way more terrified to burrow into it’s concepts than we are of the tea spilling demon, Calex. While a lot of the movies I previously mentioned tackled their subjects in mire mature ways, Wadlow instead attacks us with TikToks and awful, digital leering effects that looks so cheap and actual line of in-film dialogue that reads “It looked like a messed up Snapchat filter!” feels like Lucy Hale just gave away the effect department’s tech secrets.
Alas, any promise the movie might have had starts to spiral as the script deals more in gasp invoking scandal than genuine scares with a plot twist involving that Olivia sleep with someone’s boyfriend feeling more like a plot from Jersey Shore than an actual storyline. But while a cast strain to try and make this stuff work (Hale’s constantly huge eyes and open mouth has her looking like a curiously attractive goldfish throughout), the movie repeatedly refuses to make itself interesting. A scene where a character is dared to knock back a bottle of booze while she walks on the edge of her roof should result in a nerve jangling sequence as her friends scrabble down below to try and save her, but because the film is disturbingly lifeless, you feel absolutely nothing and while that twist ending could have been devestating, it just feels that the script lazily reversed everything we knew about the main character just to cram it in – again, see Smile 2 for better results.
Dull, derivative and boasting a director’s cut that’s only 100 minutes long (what the hell was the original length?), the most depressing thing about Truth Or Dare is that the studio obviously won’t learn a damn thing because an undemanding teen audience made the damn thing pretty profitable. But juicy box office aside, you couldn’t get me to watch this bland, homogenised fright flick again even if you dared me – and that’s the truth.
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