“Truth or dare, sweetheart.”
These were the four words that took over our minds after watching the teen horror movie “Truth or Dare,” which stars Lucy Hale and Tyler Posey and was released on April 13. The eerie atmosphere, even with the noticeable bad acting, haunted our dreams, and we could hardly focus on our daily lives for the next few days due to being paranoid.
“Truth or Dare,” rated pg-13, follows a group of college friends, including protagonist Olivia Barron, who travel to Mexico for spring break. (Spoiler alert: This review does reveal most of the movie’s twists and turns, so if you want the surprise, stop reading here.)
After playing a game of Truth or Dare with a stranger, the deadly game follows them home and entraps them, appearing everywhere they go and forcing them to answer. If someone does not play along by completing the dare or telling the truth, the game will find a way to kill the player by implanting a deadly scenario right before him or her.
The only way for the friends to delay their turn in the game is to invite more people to play. After losing several friends to the game and failing to find a way to end it, Barron decides to post a video on YouTube about her experience. It ultimately goes viral and drags many people across the world into their game, leaving the audience in suspense as the movie ends without resolving the problem.
But throughout the movie, there were many plot holes and unrealistic interactions. For example, when Olivia exposes her best friend Markie for cheating on her boyfriend, Markie’s reaction is extremely overblown in a situation where the game is already putting all of their lives at risk. It is also extremely unrealistic when the group of friends finds the creator of the game within a few hours.
Still, the cliffhanger ending is what made “Truth or Dare” so scary. YouTube is such a prevalent platform in our lives, and the thought of watching one video that could draw us into a life-or-death situation was very frightening. We wondered if supernatural games like this really existed, even though we knew it was just a movie.
“Truth or Dare” reminded us of the 2013 horror movie “The Purge.” The two movies lacked good acting and plot, but at the same time they were both entertaining to watch.
“The Purge” left us with a similar feeling at the end of the movie. The frightening movie shows the dangerous effects of letting crime happen with no punishments. We know that the insane event of having all crime be unpunishable for 12 hours to try to lower violence year-round would never realistically happen in our country, but the thought of what people are capable of still frightens us.
The “Purge” and “Truth or Dare” showed us that bad acting and plot can’t ruin the entertainment factor of a movie. Although there were countless fundamental mistakes with both films, the unrealistic plot holes made the movies humorous and the frightening parts more bearable.
