I admit it. I was looking forward to this. You see, folks, my bar is getting pretty fucking low. I no longer even hope that most movies will be good. I just hope that they will be memorable, for better or worse. With that in mind, the trailer for this movie is fucking amazing. I’ve been seeing it for months and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it (read that last sentence in Beetlejuice’s voice). I laughed out loud every time I saw the trailer for this fucking trainwreck and I hoped that it would be this year’s Wish Upon; a horror movie whose awfulness transcends itself into a great viewing experience. And it more or less delivered. While not quite as glorious as Wish Upon, it’s a staggeringly inept film made by people that couldn’t give less of a fuck.
I’m still struggling with the plot of this movie and I think it best if I start with the backstory. So there was an evil priest at a church in Mexico that would force the nuns to play hide and seek with him and the loser would be killed or raped or tortured or something. It’s PG-13, so the movie never really goes into detail. One of the nuns does the only logical thing and summons a Mexican trickster demon to posses the game (not a person, mind you, but the game of hide and seek itself) and kill the priest (I think). But those Mexican trickster demons are shifty motherfuckers and the only way to get rid of them is for the summoner to cut out their tongue and put it in a piece of pottery. So far, this is pretty much in line with the established demonology texts on party games, but then things get weird. Decades later, a bunch of teenagers are on spring break in Mexico and go to the church to play truth or dare. I never went on spring break, so I have to trust the movie that this is what people do. They break the pottery, thus releasing the demon, which possesses the game of truth or dare. The only way to survive (other than a more logical way that I’ll get to in a minute) is to drag others into the game, thus prolonging the time it takes to get to your turn. So the survivor of that game finds our main characters, also on spring break, brings them to the church and brings them into the game.
If you have seen the trailers for this movie, you probably noted the asinine computer-generated Cheshire Cat grin that adorns a character’s face when they ask the titular question. You better get used to that shit, because it makes up a shockingly large amount of this film considering how godawful the effect is. You see, for about two thirds of this movie, there really isn’t a villain. It’s just people suddenly having that ridiculous look on their face and then some stupid shit happens. It isn’t until the screenwriters realized “shit, we don’t have a villain” at around the hour mark that we get the bullshit Mexican demon nonsense. It’s also around that point that the film realizes that this isn’t particularly threatening if people just keep selecting truth, so it introduces the rule that people must pick dare every third time. It’s interesting to see screenwriters trying to address plot holes without actually writing a new draft of the entire script. It’s a level of not giving a shit that’s refreshingly honest in a strange way.
Much like Wish Upon, much of the drama in the film only exists because the characters are childish, self-absorbed assholes. Are you and your friends being systematically killed by a demon? Well, this is the perfect time to find out if that chick has a crush on your boyfriend. Then run away crying, because fuck knows you don’t have any bigger problems right now. No matter how many people get killed, these dickheads continue acting like a bunch of 12-year-olds playing spin the fucking bottle (which I have to guess will be the basis of the sequel). As for the dares and the kills, don’t worry if you’re squeamish because this is 2018 and horror movies have to be PG-13 bullshit. There is not a single moment in this movie that seems to even be trying to be scary. People are dared to pull their pants down or walk along a ledge while chugging vodka or other mundane nonsense. My friends and I dared each other to do worse shit growing up without a fucking demon forcing us to do it.
Alright, we need to talk about the ending of this movie. I normally don’t spoil endings, but this needs to be addressed because (much like John Doe said in Seven) the ending of this movie will be dissected and analyzed…. people will barely be able to comprehend it. As I alluded to earlier, there is a simple way out of this. The demon is asking people “truth or dare?” in the same order that they played the game in Mexico. All you have to do is ask the next person before the demon does, then ask them to stand on one foot or ask them what they had for breakfast or something. Sure, its inconvenient, but it would work. Our heroes have a better idea. We get down to the main girl and her best friend (well they are still besties even though brunette girl totally had a crush on blonde girl’s boyfriend and they had sex but its fine because he, like, said he loved the blonde when he was fucking the brunette, so he, like, meant it and stuff). They fucking post a video online inviting the entire world into the game and dooming humanity to death because….besties? No, really. They literally give a death sentence to planet Earth because they didn’t want to die. I mean, yeah, my way would have worked. But who wants to repeatedly have to answer an inane question when they could just murder the entire population of the fucking world instead? I have no words. When the end credits started, I just looked around the theater to see if others had actually just witnessed this. People had glazed-over looks on their faces and then all seemed to shrug and grab their coats in unison, as we all quietly left the theater and tried to come to grips with the stunning idiocy that we had just witnessed.
Fuck it, go see this movie. I need to talk to people about this thing. I have nothing nice to say about this. Nothing. The performances, the writing, the direction, the concept, everything is bargain-basement shit that should never have been made, let alone somehow get a nationwide theatrical release. In a couple years, we can all get drunk together and go see Truth or Dare 2: Spin the Bottle. No? Fine, I’ll fucking see it by myself.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_or_Dare_(2018_film)#/media/File:TruthorDarePoster.jpg
