The Dare

My expectations were fairly low for 'The Dare'. I saw some people saying it had a similar feel to 'Saw' and that's typically all the green-light I need to give a film a shot. I could see why they would make that connection - people tied up in a room with the promise of torture to come - but ultimately the film ends up being very different to that. The torturer's motivations, the way the story plays out and the gruesomeness coming more from brutality rather than clever gadgets are the main points of difference. The film had some good stuff going for it though.

I love it when you can relate to a villain. The best villains are ones that can be understood and the elite ones are the ones where you question whether or not you should be on their side. I'll be honest, by the end of this film I was genuinely torn over who I should be rooting for. The film deserves massive props for the way it set that up. It puts an enormous amount of effort into showing the back-story and it was all worth it.

The film does lose steam a little in the second half. It runs out of ideas a little and plays out a little bit too predictably for my liking. It also reveals its cards a little too early in the runtime and is left with a little too much time to fill in after that. The gore gets pretty intense at times so prepare yourself for that. There's also a fun final scene that ends the film on a positive and memorable note. I had a surprisingly good time with 'The Dare' and would recommend people give it a shot.

Not a great movie. It starts off with promise but doesn't go anywhere interesting. Gets tedious and silly. A bit sad cause there was potential. Was hard to make it through.

If you combined the emotional trauma from Silent Night Deadly Night with the what did they do to deserve this of Saw you'll get The Dare. Not bad at all.

The Dare is a new horror film directed and partly written by Giles Alderson, the director of World of Darkness.

In the film, Jay Jackson (Bart Edwards) wakes up in a basement where he is stuck with three other people. The four are being held by a masked muscular man who forces the prisoners to hurt each other. The prisoners must discover what they have in common and why they are being held captive. They must now also come up with a plan to be able to escape before their hostage lets them kill each other or he does this for themselves.

This film soon comes across as a new film from the Saw film series, which was then made by fans of this series. The film is filled with bloody moments and puzzles that the characters have to go through and see to solve. Unfortunately, these situations quickly come across as familiar and then completely to people familiar with the Saw films. Compared to the Saw films, the viewer also misses a mystery around the film to keep you interested in the film. The only tension you get with this film is only if a character makes a stupid mistake, which can cause someone else to die or be hurt by another character. As a horror fan you better watch one of the good Saw films.

The acting is also not that special, because you only get information about the characters during the movie, but they are not really well worked out to really care about the characters. Because of the many clichés and mistakes that they make, you start to irritate the characters rather than get really sorry for them.

Undoubtedly we are not in front of a masterpiece, but this film certainly has many interesting things: the atmospheres are very dark and sick, the scenes of violence really raw and intense, the cast is doing well, above all the always magnificent Richard Brake, who offers, once again, a sadistic and ruthless villain. In this era, where crap for teenagers or sloppy ghost stories pg 13 are popular, a film like this would be to be praised, and instead, as usual, the demented people of IMDB crush it and give it a miserable 5/10. A film like this, imho, deserves a 7/10.