Watch Truth or Dare?: A Critical Madness For Free

Thanks for the memories!

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

This might have been a magnificent piece of nastiness. The first half with Mike breakdown creeped me out several times. It's played straight and as brutally as the actors' talents permit. John Brace (Mike) gets better as he gets crazier. Ironically, as soon as the mask goes on, the film goes downhill. The wacky, incompetent cops show up and blow the tone of the film. It feels as if it got a makeover half-way through filming. Example: they walk all over a tense moment towards the end of the film to throw one more quick gag in. As a coup de grace, the end of the film comes with possibly the worst song ever written for film. It sounds like it was written by a social worker bingeing on coke, Quaaludes and Kenny Logins. All told, entertaining at first and then frustrating.

Having recovered from a nervous breakdown, it seems that Mike has bounced back. He has a beautiful wife, he's made great strides in his career, and has been reaping the benefits of his success. Mike's life is shattered when he discovers his wife with another man..she was Jerry's secretary and he knew Mike personally.Seeing people who aren't there, he is ordered by a figment of his imagination to slice his chest, pull out his tongue, and cut his finger off. Mike is more than a bit disturbed. He is later released by a mental hospital, and you better believe Mike will be motivated to find Jerry and his ex-wife Sharon, determined to get revenge. He's later placed back into the hospital, having hallucinogenic images of people he commands to destroy themselves during a game of "truth or dare", the same kind of game Mike participated in with an imaginary hitchhiker girl who told him to damage himself with a hunting knife.He wears this weird "Iron Man" copper mask he made in the machine shop after tearing open his face with a knife. Soon Mike is able to escape when he surprises an orderly stabbing him in the eye with a stick, and is able to free himself from the hospital after dropping a security guard, commandeering another's car. This sets of a mindless rampage as Mike kills anyone that reminds him of those who he feels contributed to his current mental state of disrepair, whether it be a mother and her baby(he smashes through a baby stroller and backs over the woman making sure she's dead! Why such a hostile act? Because she reminded him of his mother!), a kid in a park(the boy reminded him of himself and so he assaults the kid with a chainsaw to the face!), a policeman, and even three innocent people sitting on a bench awaiting a bus! The guy has serious issues. Where Mike finds the time to collect all his weapons is anybody's guess. He smashes a complaining neighbor's(he run into her garbage cans, strewing trash all over her yard!) face with a spiked club! The scene where he shoots the bench people with a machine gun is enough to warrant this slasher movie a cult following. You have keystone cops, a bungling mental hospital which continues to find ways to let this lunatic out to endanger society, the accidental murder and burning of a drunk in a shack(one cop thinks Mike is in there so he proceeds to shoot and set the shack on fire instead of any attempt to arrest him!), lingering shots of the luscious Mary Fanaro(as Sharon)naked in bed with Jerry(Bruce Gold)or in the shower lathering her nude flesh, woeful attempts to develop sympathy for Mike's condition, constant unintentional hilarity as Mike murders innocent people in gratuitous fashion(there's one long shot of the kid, attacked in the face by the chainsaw, spitting up blood and twitching;the scene showing the bloody baby carriage that had been mowed over; the crude, belligerent punk whose car is caused to wreck after the victim almost hit Mike, set on fire then shot by the machine gun), and John Brace(as Mike)in competition with Eric Freeman(Silent Night, Deadly Night 2)for worst performance in a slasher film ever as the mentally unbalanced psychopath. How director Tim Ritter incorporates the game of "Truth or Dare" in the plot really feels forced as if he had already established the title in his mind before writing the script based on it's supposed marketability. The showstopping highlight, if there aren't many to choose from, would have to be the head explosion when a fictitious patient plants a grenade in his mouth at Mike's command and the other nutcase cutting off limbs, bleeding out because he was dared to(both patients just appear in Mike's white-walled cell as he spins around, swept up in a deranged mania).

This film is truly one the crown jewels in the kingdom of So Bad It's Funny. This charmer was shot in the mid 80's and it follows the exploits of Mike Strauber, a schmuck who has the worst luck with women. Upon returning home from work he finds his big-breasted hottie wife doing the nasty with their best friend, he obliges them with a hilarious dramatic reaction before taking off in his gold Firebird to, uh, drive around for a long, long time. As the story unfolds, we see poor Mike suffer a nervous breakdown that results in hallucinations and self-mutilation. It's all the more tragic because this poor slob can't even get an IMAGINARY girl to score with him! Anyway, we spend the rest of the movie finding a masked, disfigured, murderous Mike out to exact revenge upon his good-for-nothing cheating wife with the great tits. Of course along the way he manages to kill a number of innocents including: a group of old people at a Bus Stop, a little leaguer, some cops, a couple of "punk rockers" and even a baby in carriage using a number of weapons including a submachine gun and a battle mace! "Truth Or Dare" showcases some of the worst acting, wrting, and music ever committed to film, and believe me, it all works in this film's favor! If you're looking for 90 minutes of sick, jaw-droppingly bad horror hilarity, this is the film for you!

Truth or Dare is a campy, sadistic, truly warped horror movie. Shot on videotape and transferred to film, it actually benefits from its amateurishness, resulting in a genuinely disturbing experience that really packs a punch. This is one of the very few movies where video photography actually contributes the atmosphere instead of destroying it. It's incredibly gory and shows things that mainstream films wouldn't even imply. Where else are you going to see a baby run over by a car and a little boy chainsawed? And what's really interesting is that you never know where it'll go next. You think it's going to be a standard get-out-of-the-asylum-and-terrorize-the-ex-wife stalker plot, but things take a series of unexpected twists, with the bloodbath getting more and more demented. There are many moments where you don't know whether to laugh, scream, or get sick.There are the usual bad-movie routines. The acting is variable--Kerry Ellen Walker, as the frizzy-haired hitchhiker chick, seems to have been plucked directly from a high-school production of Bye Bye Birdie. At the climax, the copper mask pulsates when the killer breathes. Still, it's all so numbingly brutal and unsettling that you can suspend disbelief ("hmm...very thin copper, apparently") and get dragged along on the bloody joyride. Kay Reed sings the hyper-dramatic theme song, "A Critical Madness," which is the source of my summary quote. Truly unforgettable, and not for the faint of heart or those concerned with "taste." As if children are immune to death!