When
I first saw the trailer of Blumhouse’s latest low-rent horror flick aimed at the
YA crowd, ‘Truth or Dare,’ I couldn’t help but roll my eyes into the top of my
head in the grand “For cryin’ out loud, give me a break!” fashion. But since the movie, which takes the popular but
potentially embarrassing high school/college party game to heretofore
unexplored new territory, features an above average-looking young ensemble cast
including “Pretty Little Liar” Lucy Hale whom I had a bit of a crush on (I picked "Truth," sorry), I
thought “Why not?” With a built-in
audience and costing only $3.5 million to make, ‘Truth or Dare’ is virtually
critics-proof and guaranteed to come out on top no matter how badly the movie
is panned. So take that, 14 percent (and
probably going down further) on Rotten Tomatoes!
The
28-year old Hale plays college co-ed Olivia (which she still pulls off
admirably because she’s baby-faced), who goes to Mexico with a group of friends
including her bff Markie (Violett Beane) on spring break where she meets
Carter, who got the group to play a game of “harmless” Truth or Dare. Except for the fact that the game is dictated
by a jester demon who won’t let the players back out or the game to end, with
the result that whoever doesn’t follow through (telling the truth or doing the dare, with the additional house
rule that you can’t have more than two consecutive “truths” without a
“dare”) will be possessed by the demon and die a gruesome death by his or her own hands while wearing a rictus grin.
Like last year’s utterly forgettable ‘Wish
Upon,’ ‘Truth or Dare’ is a blatant “cash grab” for the hard-earned money of
high schoolers and early twenty-somethings.
It’s unapologetic for what it is and doesn’t even try to pretend to be a
good movie, but it’s also not as terrible as some critics would have us
believe. As with bad B-movies,
low-budget horror like these can be a guilty pleasure if you approach them with
the right mindset.
Grade: C
No comments:
Post a Comment