A while ago I watch another movie called Truth or Dare thinking I was going to be watching this movie. It was so bad that I forced Jef to watch it with me, just so I could rant about it on the podcast. Now, finally, I can say that I’ve seen the movie where sexy teens are menaced by a demonic Snapchat filter. At least one of the characters in the movie literally says that it looks like a bad Snapchat filter so at least the film is honest about how incredibly stupid that effect looks.

Like any good horror movie, a group of sexy college students ends up getting killed off one by one in order from least likable non-main character up. It all starts when they go on spring break to Mexico and poor, single Olivia meets a guy at the bar that convinces her and her friends to go to an old mission and play truth or dare. Turns out that if you play truth or dare there then a demon gets to use the game to fuck with you and bar guy was just dared to get more people to play the game. Now they have to play or die and there’s a super convenient reason why they can’t just pick “truth” every time because the original group played where you can only have 2 truths in a row and then you have to do a dare so that’s the rules now.

Seeing that this was PG-13 and having just watched two previous Blumhouse joints that were PG-13, I had some serious reservations on this going in. At least this movie tries its damnedest to be a real horror film even within those constraints. As goofy as the smile demon thing is, it is at least a vehicle for some actual gruesome and sad scenes. Not really a big spoiler to say that most everyone dies but it was especially sad for Brad, the one gay character. The movie had forced him to tell his dad the truth about his sexuality and then after when we see his father accepting him, he ends up getting a dare that gets him killed right in front of his father. While the movie overall might not be amazing; it does so some things very well.

Spoilers: The end of this movie is probably one of the best things about it. The rules of the game are established to be “If you’re asked, you’re in” and I cannot emphasize how annoying that is since that’s not the way games work but whatever, it’s necessary for the ending set-up. Once Olivia ends up tricking the demon that is causing all this to tell the truth and finds out that it wont stop until everyone is dead; she ends up basically fucking over the world just to buy time for her and her best friend. She makes a YouTube video about what happened and then asks everyone at the end “Truth or Dare?”, essentially dooming countless people to embarrassment at best and straight up death at worst. Side effect of this, though, is that it would 100% prove the existence of the supernatural to the world so that’s something.

Score: 3 out of 5. Enjoyable enough to sit through even though it is a touch predictable. I think that’s why I liked the end so much because I didn’t see it coming.