The Collegio Pittsburg's student voice since 1916
Related Articles
Snapchat is a social media platform focused on sending temporary photos or uploading said photos to a temporary story for all your friends to see. Snapchat has a feature called filters that will modify your face to change it into silly things like giving yourself puppy dog ears or making you look semi-spooky. Someone at Blumhouse, a film company, saw this and apparently thought it would make a great feature length movie and decided to call it “Truth or Dare.”
In all actuality, “Truth or Dare” is a horror film produced by renowned hit-or-miss studio Blumhouse Productions, who has brought us great films such as “Get Out,” but also brought us… well… “Truth or Dare.”
The main premise of the film is that a group of friends play a game of truth or dare while on vacation in Mexico, but the game takes a turn for the worse when demonic entities start appearing and forcing the characters to play a game of truth or dare, where the consequence of failure is death.
This is normally the part of the review where I say things that I like about the movie. The problem is I didn’t like anything. I mean, I guess the film didn’t give me a headache when I looked at it? That’s a plus, I guess, although a very sad one. The film was shot competently, nothing outstanding but nothing terrible either. In other words, the cinematography was entirely adequate, almost painfully so.
Now the part for the many, many cons. First of all, the stupid faces that are supposed to be the main scare of the movie. They literally look like snapchat filters. The main character even lampshades this by saying “It looked like a (messed up) Snapchat filter.” This line was probably added after the terrible reception of the first trailer because it felt very out of place during the movie. During the movie, almost every time one of these dumb faces was on screen the audience laughed. I’ve never seen an entire theater audience laugh at a horror movie before, so I’ve got to hand it to “Truth or Dare,” it sure did provide me a unique viewing experience.
Another problem with the film is that the writing was absolutely terrible. One of the main characters is a literal sociopathic drug-dealer, who is also best friends with the group. Why are they friends with him? They don’t even like him. Another example is that a character died, and I realized I didn’t even know their name, I only figured out they were dead whenever they stopped showing up for a few scenes.
I recall that there was one horror scene that I liked out of the entire movie. Can you guess why I liked it? Because it didn’t have the stupid smiling face in the entire thing, and I thought it was well done. So I enjoyed about five minutes out of the hundred-and-three-minute run-time.
Then we get to the “twist” ending. It left me flabbergasted, but not in a good way. It left me wondering how in the world did anyone think this was a good ending at all? Again, the entire theater laughed and some people even started heckling the screen. Then, when the credits started rolling everyone shot up in their seats and fled the theater.
All in all, “Truth or Dare” is one of the worst movies I’ve seen get a theatrical release. That being said, I really enjoyed it. Not because it was good, but because I was laughing so hard at how this dumpster fire got made by a major studio. This film failed at literally everything it set out to do. I don’t recommend seeing this in theater, but if you love bad movies like I do, check it out when it inevitably gets added to Netflix in about three weeks. If you don’t enjoy watching the worst things that film has to offer, stay far, far away.
20/100