The Dare Is Kinda Like Saw, Streaming Free

I watched this horror movie because a fellow reviewer showed a still from The Dare. It featured a well-toned and muscled antagonist. Horror and eye candy? Yes, please. The gist of the story also promised that The Dare 2019 would be something like the movie, Saw. A basement with prisoners, a captor, and puzzle-solving. It’s safe to say I went into this film with a positive attitude. The opening scenes were excellent. Horror tropes are flipped on their head and common sense prevails. Scary movies often feel like they need to rely on the stupidity of their central characters to tell a story, but not here.

The Dare movie begins in a family home where Jay Jackson lives with his daughter and wife. He hears a noise in the middle of the night and decides to investigate. The anti-trope situation allows Jay to lock doors, not follow obvious red herrings, and use all of his faculties with intelligence.

Superb Practical Effects in The Dare Film

What the overall movie does well lies within its execution. The practical effects are brutal and bloodthirsty. In other narratives of this ilk, captors are punished for disobeying rules. Instructions that are not adhered to result in automatic slicing and dicing. There is torture using lots of creative devices including being force-fed bugs. In between the four prisoners try to get to know each other to find out what they have in common.

The thing is, it’s the very things they have in common that eventually lead to the futility of the whole story. While it seems ridiculous to try and place yourself into the shoes of a horror film narrative, I simply couldn’t get past the fact this group of strangers didn’t assume their pasts had simply caught up with them. Additionally, to make matters worse, they were all involved in the same behavior that ultimately led to them being punished similarly.

The Lobotomy Horror Trope

More to the point, this essential series of details produced the inclusion of my least-liked horror movie trope; The lobotomy. To overtly allow the story to continue with no repercussions the memory-loss prop rears its head. Here each of these locked up and chained consumers of raw meat shrug their shoulders in confusion as they try and think of anything they might have done to deserve what’s happening to them. It’s as if they were each given a lobotomy off-screen that we didn’t get to see.

What’s left is simply gore for gore’s sake. And if that’s the kind of thing that floats your proverbial torture boat, then you may get a kick out of The Dare. The masked tormentor gets most of the character depth for having a well-explained past. Performances all around are pretty good. Guaranteed to score points in grossing you out, those looking for that kind of thing will get what they came for. Ultimately though, for me, the final reveal and my inability to warm to any of the other characters made this less than satisfying.

The director of the movie is Giles Alderson who previously made World of Darkness. A well-received documentary about vampires. Here he joins writer Jonny Grant (Arthur & Merlin: Knights of Camelot.) For more information on where to watch movies and where to watch The Dare, check out JustWatch.com.

The Dare movie is rated

2.5 needed more muscles out of 5