Truth or Dare Review (Film, 2017) #31DaysofHorror
Do not be confused or mistaken by the following phenomena. Have you ever come across a horror film that looks just like another horror film you know is coming out? It has a similar (if not identical) title, a similar poster, and even a similar plot, but it’s not the same film. It’s a separate film that is coming out around the same time. Sometimes, it’s pure coincidence—there are only so many spins on a ghost story or a slasher. Other times, it’s intentional—there are studios who will release a slapstick shark horror/comedy to compete with each SyFy movie of the week release (or, more often, vice versa—SyFy loves their own version of a could-be hit). No matter the circumstances, just be aware that you aren’t imagining things. Horror is filled with carbon copy releases that sometimes are significantly better than the main release.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A group of college kids decide to party in a creepy location. Wait. Come back.
I had to do a double take when I saw Truth or Dare pop up in my feed. I hated the Blumhouse Truth or Dare, but this wasn’t the same Truth or Dare. This one had a very different looking cast playing a game of Truth or Dare turned deadly by an unstoppable paranormal entity. The entity communicates the same way—by voice, by video, by text appearing anywhere you can imagine—to force you to play. They also have many shared scenes and stunts involving roofs, cheating, guns, and committing aggressive crimes with guns. They even share the twist that if you refuse to play or lie when it’s your turn, you die, and the false sense of hope of finding a previous survivor who reveals that there is no way to win.
For whatever reason, these two identically titled films with nearly identical plots (down to the number of participants—couples and friendships included) feel like very different films. Where the Blumhouse Truth or Dare felt like a cruel exercise in exploitation, director Nick Simon’s Truth or Dare feels like a tense paranormal slasher. It’s just a difficult exercise to figure out why.
The quality of acting in this version of Truth or Dare is good. I think the advantage here is that the characters are given a strong backstory based on creepy group outings every year for Halloween. The person who suggests the game in a haunted place is a friend, not a stranger, and that allows for a much more expressive and rewarding escalation of tension in the the group. The relationships feel real and add a nice weight to the overall story.
At its core,Truth or Dare straddles the line between traditional haunted house film and paranormal slasher.
The effects are really well done, too. This Truth or Dare doesn’t punish the friends for physically trying to escape the game right away. The first act feels like a haunted house story in the “the house can fight back” style of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. The players find themselves locked in the haunted house by the paranormal entity and given very clear time limits on how long someone has for their turn. The players do escape the house, and the film wisely builds a false sense of security that the game can only happen at the house itself.
Perhaps the biggest advantage here is the game feels far more personal. Take the “truth” moment where Maddie is asked if she slept with her best friend Alex’s boyfriend Tyler. She immediately says “no” and every player in the game gets a text message saying that’s a lie. They pressure her and she admits to doing it. This is immediately after Alex is dared to make out with Maddie, burning a trust that allowed no real complaints on a stupid physical dare to become something utterly heartbreaking for the players.
It continues on from there. Some challenges are clearly designed to shock the players into understanding the stakes with minimal risk. No one is going to safely be able to complete a live electrical circuit for too long, but a significantly overweight young man is going to have a better chance at survival than seven other thin and fit young people. A medical student is going to approach challenges surrounding injury and pain in a different way than someone not studying the human body. At the same time, someone accused of sleeping with their best friend’s boyfriend is probably going to be more open to revealing the truth than someone hiding a drug addiction that could ruin their reputation.
The entity is toying with its knowledge of these players, personalizing the game to create a false sense of security in the first round before betraying the players with far more dangerous and punishing challenges in the second. As evil as the entity is, this unseen villain wants a fair game. Players are allowed to work together on obviously deadly games to try to avoid losing their lives. People who survive telling the truth—at least those given the chance to—receive physical challenges from then on. If they can survive what’s put in front of them and stick together, they might have a shot of walking away alive; you know that’s never what happens in a paranormal slasher.
This version of Truth or Dare, made for the SyFy channel, is one of the rare make a different version of a could-be popular horror film products to actually improve upon the mainstream release. It’s a matter of tone and approach. Nick Simon’s version feels fair; the Blumhouse version does not. That’s not just the rules of the game, either. The backstory, the character arcs, the order of the games, and the intimacy of the struggle—only once does a game actually involve any outside players—all make for a film that just feels more grounded and enjoyable. It’s a solid B-movie and it’s not pretending to be anything more.
Truth or Dare is currently streaming on Netflix.
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