Truth or Dare

Presumably the four (?) writers of Truth or Dare have never seen the likes Welcome to Hell, Final Destination and It Follows and thought they had landed on a great idea, or they have and decided that this could be some sort of homage. Whatever the result is a mishmash of well-worn tropes and ideas that after its initial burst settles down and down and down.

Its’s spring break and a group of friends decide to go off down to Mexico for high-jinx’s. After copious amounts of booze, they take up the offer of some cool dude, who has been chatting up one of the women, to go up to an old church and play truth or dare. After a couple of turns, the cool guy runs off telling them that he’s passed on a demon’s curse whereby whatever they chose to do, they have to, or they die.

As usual no notice is taken until one is dared to expose himself in bar, chickens out and treading on a pool ball falls of the table smashing his head on the adjoining table. We know that the demon is in control as the faces of the victims contort to look like a combination of the Joker and V’s mask.

Now in the grip of the curse, the friends set about trying to get rid of it while dealing with some unpleasant truths and nasty dares. The results are in one case a friend walking off with the hump about four times and some nasty incidents. There’s actually quite a good section when one is dared to walk around a roof, drunk while finishing off a bottle of vodka. Needless to say, complications to the lore are introduced otherwise it would be pretty simple to get out of.

Truth or Dare is an old parlour game that this writer knows can go very badly wrong and is well suited to horror. So, despite that it is very much indebted to a few other films, the core idea is solid. Unfortunately, what director Jeff Wadlow has come up with is a vacuous lacklustre film that doesn’t offer much in the way of either horror, tension or thrills.