Truth or Dare (2018)Watched this a couple days ago, but since at my current rate of movie watching, who knows if I'll get to another horror film for the marathon.
This certainly has potential. The most obvious comparison point is Final Destination, with a supernatural force following this group of youngsters around. But now instead of just seeking to achieve the death it feels itself owed, it makes them play Truth or Dare. Lie and you die, refuse a dare and you die. It actually has the potential to be really morally interesting. There's a bit of a trolley problem nature about the idea of valuing your own life against whatever the cost will be of the truth you have to tell or the dare you are asked to do. While it is hard to imagine a truth worth dying to conceal, one can fathom a few. And the film's strengths are definitely in its truths. Its dares on the other hand generally lack the specificity to be meaningful, though in a few cases they definitely ask the characters to inflate their own value. [Note here that Nerve is a far better handling of dares]. Unfortunately, the film largely ignores the moral question, and in its conclusion spits directly in its face.
In the broader question of "how to survive" it hits in some part on It Follows and, to the extent that series touched on it, Final Destination. It is elaborate and unfulfilling. But maybe the chief failing keeping Truth or Dare from a horror cannon including those two other films, is it quite simply lacks quality kills. If you aren't going to use your horror to speak to me intellectually, at least satisfy my carnal desires that Cabin In The Woods winks at. Final Destination was the king of the quality kill, even as the films got kind of bad. Here it is all so remarkably boring, the dark spirit's go to move might as well be dying peacefully in ones sleep.
- Slightly Scary (mostly for the weird expression people get when the spirit inhabits them)