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Truth or Dare (2017)
"Final Destination" meets "Jumanji"
Take this with a grain of salt, as "Truth or Dare" was clearly not produced with aspirations of becoming some iconic horror flick. No, this movie is like over-buttered popcorn -- it doesn't taste all that bad until you finish the bucket, at which point you want to puke and wonder why you didn't just stick with a pack of Twizzlers.
A group of college-age-somethings go to a haunted house to play a game of truth or dare. Turns out the house was the setting for a particularly violent game of truth or dare some 30 years prior, during which all but one participant died. As the friends start their own game, a mysterious spirit forces them through a bunch of either disgusting and/or deadly dares until they start getting bumped off one by one.
Though the actors do their best with some pretty cruddy material, the various dares they have to endure are pretty ridiculous, from eating charred flesh to drinking poison. Explanations about the mystery spirit are absent and the characters are pretty stereotypical, so you never really feel attached to the story. Not a horrible viewing on a rainy October night, but there are far better horror flicks out there.
Malevolent (2018)
"Hostel" meets "The Conjuring"
This well-produced, well-cast thriller sets the right tone but ultimately goes down a disturbing road that may prove unsettling for some viewers. Siblings Angela (star-in-the-making Florence Pugh) and Jackson (Ben Lloyd-Hughes) are a ghost-hunting team who essentially con grieving families into believing the spooky spirits haunting their homes can be dealt with thanks to Angela's sixth-sense gifts. It's all essentially a way for Jackson to make money to support his drug habit. But quickly Angela starts to actually see and hear strange bumps in the night, and her once fictitious abilities become all too real.
Angela wants out of the con game once and for all, but Jackson convinces her and his ghostbusting tech team to take one last job at a creepy old Scotland estate. As the group investigates the sprawling grounds, Angela starts to see the spirits of several young orphan girls who were apparently murdered at the estate years before. As Angela, Jackson and their pals dive further into the mystery surrounding the girls' deaths, the very real danger of their situation becomes all too pronounced. It all leads to a pretty graphic and disturbing "torture porn" climax (think "Hostel," "Saw" and similar films). If you can stomach that sort of thing, "Malevolent" actually moves along pretty well, thanks in large part to a cast on its A game. Don't expect a stellar moviegoing experience, but it's a decent horror film that makes for an entertaining view during the Halloween season.
Hold the Dark (2018)
Violent, dreary, and confusing as heck
I've been a wolf lover all of my life, so I was excited to see this moody Netflix film set in the gorgeous Alaskan tundra. But very quickly I realized this isn't a "wolf" movie per se, rather a mystery/thriller/slasher flick that never quite knows what it wants to be or how to unspool its confusing AF plot in a digestible way.
There is a lot of pointless, indiscriminate killing. I found myself wondering "why?" and "what's the point?" throughout the film, and the filmmakers never quite provide an answer. By the end you're left wondering what the hell you just watched. The performances are solid throughout, and Skarsgard plays a good creepy killer, but the plot is so WTF that the acting and gorgeous Alaskan setting fade into the blurry background. A decently made film, but not worth your time.