Deadly Dares: Truth or Dare IV

DEADLY DARES: TRUTH OR DARE IV

WRITER: Tim Ritter

DIRECTOR: Tim Ritter

STARRING: Casey Miracle as Tuner Downing

Jessica Cameron as Dara

Billy W. Blackwell as Axel Lawless

Heather Price as Rose Benz

Claude Miles as Charley Bowles

QUICK CUT: Truth or dare spreads across the internet, and a good time was had by all!

THE MORGUE

Tuner - An internet journalist who is down on his luck. He’s a bit of an introvert, doesn’t like to make waves, and has very few interests or motivations in life. Until…

Rose - Tuner’s fiancee, who has had enough of his ways, and leaves him to focus on her psychology studies, and maybe find someone who can keep up with her.

Axel - A friend from work, not quite a full on friend of Tuner’s. He paints himself as a bit of a ladies man, and sees Tuner has something of a project once he’s down in the dumps.

Dara - A very outgoing woman Tuner meets online, and pushes him to open up and get in touch with his inner wildman.

Charley - Axel and Tuner’s boss, and he seems like a professional to most of the world, but he’s not quite as clean cut when he’s out of public view. A pretty typical upper management type.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! March is here, and it is coming in like a copperfaced serial killer! Yep, that's right, it's time to check back in on the works of Tim Ritter, with Truth or Dare 4: Deadly Dares! There was a pretty big gap since ToD 3 which came out in 1998, but the series did eventually return. So let's get to it.

The movie begins with a bunch of videos of people doing dares, from "Daretube" dot com. It's your typical sort of stuff, like brushing teeth with shampoo, eating dog food, and culminating in the classic, and dangerous, "kiss my wife". This escalates to the two couples fighting, and somehow getting shot.

Most of this is irrelevant to the actual story, but sets the tone, and is genuinely a good update of the whole idea of the series, for modern times. And is genuinely something I think people would do in this universe.

It does build to the main character, Tuner, as his fiancé accepts a dare for the two of them to run naked down the street, and he is not drunk enough for this.

I dare you to do this for your job for the next two years.

We jump ahead some time, as Tuner narrates that his life sucks, and he's about to upload a video of him murdering someone.

So then we jump BACK to find out how we got here. Pick a time frame and stick with it!

Tuner has lost his job, he meets up with Rose, and following his performance, or lack thereof, at the recorded dare, she decides to break up with him. It's been a long time coming, since he's always been a bit spineless and meek.

But other than that, my life’s just great.

We get a lot more narration as Tuner wanders around Kentucky feeling sorry for himself, and that's perfectly fair!

Breaking from Truth or Dare style, he does NOT wander down to the beach to sit on the rocks and stare mournfully at the ocean. Largely because, in the interim between 3 and 4, Tim Ritter moved from Florida to Kentucky, and there is a distinct lack of ocean to stare at. Still, the wandering and bemoaning his loss fills that gap nicely.

He stops on a park bench, and his friend from work, Axel, wanders by, and talks Tuner into taking his mind off things by going out on the town.

Momma always said life is like a box of chocolates; it looks like shit, but you bite into it anyway.

None of which we get to see, as there's a quick montage of the street life of Lexington, and then it's back to Tuner's place.

Tuner recounts the truth or dare incident, and that makes Axel recall that Mike Strauber guy who went on a killing spree a few decades ago.

As he shares the plot of the first movie, we get some flashbacks...using new footage, instead of the original. Now, I've listened to the commentary, and Ritter explained how he saw a fan's recreation of the scene, and liked it so much he decided to use it. And I GET it, but at the same time, it feels so jarring.

Not to mention, this reaction is hard to top.

I also have to say, not liking the revisionist history of this new Truth ot Dare #1 with Mike's new mask being the more angular, industrial mask from later movies.

Tuner isn't sure he believes all this, so goes to the internet to check his facts. They find a site dedicated to Mile Strauber, and it's also running a truth or dare game between real people.

Axel encourages Tuner to play, and they end up choosing some hot blonde, and yeah, sure, let's meet your new girlfriend on a website dedicated to a serial killer. No way can THAT go wrong.

I dare you to kill all the men your wife has slept with!

So Tuner picks some chick coincidentally named Dara, and they start playing, beginning slowly with some easy truths to set the stage.

Dara says she's yet to meet a guy on this hellsite that is daring enough for her, so things escalate, and she dares Tuner to punch Axel in the face.

We speed through a bit of a montage, with Tuner daring Dara to do sexytime stuff, and she goes the other direction doing hurtful, painful things to him. Well, that hardly seems fair.

So eventually Tuner goes to ask Axel to film his dares as they escalate, and they go to find someone they can rob.

Before he finds his victim, Tuner decides to paint his face copper, and style it in an homage to Mike's copper mask. The original one. Which makes the scenes with the new mask more problematic, but I digress. They do have the original on the website, at least.

They head out, find some poor woman in the middle of an empty park, and Tuner steals her purse. He then dumps it out, finds the wallet, and takes 100 bucks. Dara is suitably impressed.

Just paint your face, the shadows smiled.

All this adrenaline is quite the rush for Tuner, never feeling more alive, so he proceeds to cause more mischief. It’s like the anti Jigsaw, but instead of making other people realise they’ve never tasted life, he’s the one who realises it, and hurts people to feel that rush over and over again.

He follows a homeless man, and proceeds to beat the shit out of him for his next dare. Which again, impresses Dara.

And once again, Dara is impressed, and completes her dare of masturbating on camera while watching his hobo fight.

After Winterbeast, a strict No Plaid policy as put into place.

Dara wants to take things to the next next next level, and have him kill someone who matters to him. She tries for his ex, but he can't quite do that, yet. So instead, she sics Tuner on his boss.

Before you can say, "Kill my boss? Do I dare live out the American dream??" Tuner does recon to see when he can find an opportunity. Which, to his credit, is pretty smart, since this is someone who will recognise his former employee.

Tuner learns Bowles takes his girlfriend on a picnic after church on Sundays, and decides that's the best place to do the deed. So he grabs Axel and head out to the forest.

Charlie gets a little too hands on with his girlfriend, forgetting that no means no, and things take an awful turn. All so Tuner can have a suitable excuse for his murder to be all right, and stop them from losing the audience.

The girl fights back, and it looks like someone might even beat Tuner to the punch, but Charlie reaches out and snaps her neck like it's a stalk of celery.

While Charlie is distracted with Axel, because he's about as subtle as a dump truck, Tuner comes along and shoots their boss with a crossbow. Before he gets killed, Chuck goes on a nice little rant, and he's got some wonderfully manic energy going.

And this catches us up with the uploading scene at the start of the movie. Tuner wonders how could this have been done, and I SWEAR IF YOU GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING, I will murder everyone.

Dara gets off to the murder, and with his next dare, she professes her love for him.

In return, she dares Tuner to turn off the privacy settings on all his videos, so the world, or at least the world wide web, can see his handiwork.

After much reasonable hesitation, Tuner does it, and spends the next few days on a borderline panic waiting for the cops to come find him.

Following a bunch of nightmares, Tuner decides no one is coming for him, yet, and relaxes a bit. And that's when he gets a surprise. His snuff film has reached a million hits on the site, and has sparked a wave of copycat Copperfaces causing murder and mayhem. And we get to see a montage of a lot of it.

After nearly ten straight minutes of chaos, we get back to Tuner's story, and get talk about how now Mike's legacy will live on forever on the internet.

These movies just don’t have the budget they once did.

So Dara gives Tuner one final dare, and agrees to meet him afterwards. All he has to do is go and break Mike Strauber out of where he's being held.

Which just so happens to be a minimum security prison right down the street, and Dara will e-mail him all the details. She's put a lot of thought and prep work into this.

So Axel and Tuner head out, and Tuner comments how breaking a serial killer out is about as heavy as you can get. I mean, sure, about the only thing heavier is if you go out there and kill someo...OH WAIT YOU ALREADY TOPPED THIS.

After a lot of sneaking and avoiding guards, they find Strauber, unstrap him from his gurney, and try and get him to leave.

But Mike just lays there, doing nothing, until it occurs to Tuner that he has to *dare* Mike to leave. Love that simple little detail.

Following a half-hearted chase, the trio make it back to the car, and Mike turns on Tuner, stabbing him.

Evil dares tonight! Evil dares tonight!!

Tuner has the audacity to narrate, "Who coulda seen that coming?" And, um, uh... *raises hand*

But that's when Mike removes his mask, and reveals that he...is actually a she! And no, Strauber didn't transition during his time in prison, it's actually Rose, and oh holy shit this was a long con by her. With help from a friend, and even Axel was in on it.

It was all a test to see how far he'd go to get Rose back, but instead he went all in on Dara, who is actually a friend of Rose's.

The breakout was one final test, and he failed it. So Rose knew he was irredeemable, and that's why she played Strauber, so she could stop Tuner and do the right thing.

So the two get in the car and leave Tuner for dead, and as his body goes numb, he ponders if maybe, just maybe, these had all been figments of his imagination, his own broken psyche, driving him to murder, and kill himself, for the greater good.

*flips over tables* Because it was all a dream/psychotic break. But y'know what? It's also oh so very Truth or dare, remixing stuff from the first three movies into one.

TRISK ANALYSIS

Video: It’s not bad, but I wish it was better. I know there’s a new BluRay version out there, that I do wanna get my hands on at some point.

Audio: Not too bad, all about average.

Sound Bite: "I was just polishing my bat when it suddenly went off!"

Body Count: There’s that big montage of chaos in the middle where I might’ve missed one or two. Even then, the movie still delivers.

1 - 4:30 minutes and a daretube player gets shot for kissing another woman's husband

2 - Charlie kills his fiancé by snapping her neck.

3 - Tuner kills Charlie with a crossbow

4 - We see a coppermasked man kill his wife

5 - Another axes someone in a field

6 - A man electrocutes his wife in the hot tub

7 - A copperfaced woman kills her boss.

8 - A woman gets run over by a train

9 - A man gets set on fire

10 - Mike kills Tuner

Best Corpse: I’m kinda partial to the guy gets axes in the back and his arm ripped off.

Blood Type - C: Kinda a middle grade here, since there IS a lot of blood, but it’s in the additional montage of stuff, so I don’t feel like it counts.

Drink Up! every time someone says “Dare complete!”

Movie Review: The Truth or Dare series has always frustrated and delighted me, and the fourth entry in the series continues this trend, I am pleased to say. Ritter has long been a guy with solid ideas, something huge swings like with Killing Spree’s final act, and genuine skill, with limited budget. Fortunately, these ideas don’t require much, and Tim does a fantastic job of getting a lot for not a lot of money. The acting is pretty good where it needs to be, the production values are all right, and once again, Ritter nails that feeling of sleaze but with enough skill to pull it off well and it feels like a real movie. I’ve said it before, but this series is almost the perfect example of the sort of films I love to find, that feel the most “Trisk like”. Still, it’s got a few too many twists, and it is a bit overlong, but still, rock solid for this sourt of thing. Three out of five copper masks.

Entertainment Value: The chaos is a blast, the story unfolds nicely, and things are just heightened enough to keep you intrigued. Three out of five spray bottles of beach.