Blumhouse’s Truth Or Dare: Movie Review

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Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare tells the story of a group of college students who travel to Mexico on spring break. On their last night in Mexico, protagonist Olivia, one of the college students, meets another student, Carter, who is also supposedly on break. After befriending her, Carter leads Olivia and her friends to an abandoned mission where he asks them to play truth or dare. After the game creates a bit of tension within the group, they leave the mission and return to school. However, the students soon realize that the game followed them back, haunting their lives in mysterious and dangerous ways.

Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare is a movie of cliché. The plot is based around a group of college students going on their spring break to Mexico, following the student-vacation-gone-wrong idea created by classics like Friday the 13th and The Evil Dead. On the theme of cliché, the movie creates a lot of tension at unexpected points with the use of jump scares. For example, there is a scene where one of the characters, Markie, opens the door to Olivia’s room loudly, and it scares the audience. There is nothing in the scene to actually worry about, but, as said, it is unexpectedly loud. Scenes like this throughout the movie puts the audience on guard for the actual jump scares that come after.

Also, the movie does a great job of setting reality for the characters. Certain scenes, such as the first instance where the game of Truth or Dare comes back to haunt the students in the library, shows the audience that this game is real  for the characters; it gets the audience emotionally involved with the characters and the plot, making each death hit harder and harder.

For people who can appreciate the art of making a horror film, there are a lot of things that the movie portrayed really well. The plot of the movie, although very cliché, was well developed and did not hold any plot holes. For each situation that the characters found themselves in, the way they behaved was realistic (ish) and made sense. In addition, although there is a very serious tone about the predicament the students get themselves into, the movie uses comedic relief to make the audience vulnerable for the next jump scare—it works marvelously. The jokes were put in at an optimal time to catch the viewer off guard. The use of dark humor also added another element of shock-value to the movie.

The biggest criticism for this movie is the ending. Although I will not spoil the ending, it contradicted itself. The ending had a number of other directions that it could have gone to make it more logical, but it seemed as though the writers did not take fully into account all the options that could have been used.

However, despite the movie’s few shortcomings, Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare is very entertaining. Although it may not live up to every aspect of the thriller or horror genre, the novelty quality makes the movie fun and exciting to watch. For horror enthusiasts looking for a somewhat scary movie to satisfy your thirst on Friday the 13th, Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare could be the movie for you!

The movie comes out Friday, April 13th.