By Justin Waldman for Mr. Will Wong
The Dare is part-mystery, part-Torture Porn. Gruesomely-violent, the Film is all about the terror and less the why, but undeniably entertaining.
Things open with Jay (Bart Edwards) with his family. Some masked intruders enter, attack his wife, and knock him out. The next thing we see is Jay handcuffed to a wall in what looks like a prison cell with three other people, Adam (Richard Short) and Kat (Alexandra Evans). Enter masked man Dominic (Robert Maaser), who is built like a Bodybuilder, wearing a deformed mask made out of flesh, who instructs one of the prisoners to torture another cell mate or they get tortured themselves. No one seems to know why they’re there, or why the torture is so brutal. The tactics are unconventional. Instead of inflicting pain through branding, hacking-off limbs etc, the victims are forced to do things like eat an inch worm, putting maggots in one’s eyeball, inserting spider eggs into someone’s ear – really gruesome things which are visceral in that many of us on some level fear them in our heads, pardon the pun.
What makes The Dare unique also is its timeline shifts, but it is never apparent. In this shift, we meet Credence (Richard Brake) a very disturbed individual. He has a vat of acid in the shed, and dissolves pigs in said acid. What is truly disturbing about this though, is he showers the child he is holding captive in the pigs’ blood, in one of the more off-putting moments throughout the Movie. You cannot erase this from your mind after seeing it.
The Movie has a concise running time to keep the audience engaged throughout. They are in suspense for the first half of the Movie and then comes the surreal torture. With some crafty execution and engaging performances, The Dare true to its name, dares to test our thresholds of tolerance.
VVS Films release THE DARE digitally and on-demand Tuesday, June 8, 2021.
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