I found this on Amazon Prime when I was looking for something to fill in an hour or so without too much attention from me! It did the job. It's not the best recent horror film I've seen, but it's far from being the worst. If you can ignore a major plot hole it's fine. OK, SPOILERS AHEAD!
The premise is that four people are being held in a dungeon and are forced to harm one another by a masked madman. The perpetrator had been held prisoner in a remote farmhouse since childhood by a crazy guy following a dare gone wrong. In order to complete a series of dares to become part of a gang, he had to go into the creepy house...and was never seen again. He becomes a replacement son for the inhabitant, and eventually becomes mad himself. Having been lied to by his "adoptive father" who told him no one was looking for him, he kills him once he learns the truth, and as punishment for having been denied a normal life, tracks down and torments the other kids, now grown up, who abandoned him to his fate and who never told the police about the dare.
This overlooks one basic flaw. Most kids of that age don't deal with guilt very well. Even if they had instigated the dare of going into the creepy house, the ensuing missing persons case would have caused at least one of the kids to crack under pressure and tell what had happened. For most kids the thought of being punished for their part in such a situation pales in comparison to having to keep such a huge guilty secret. At least one of those kids would have told the police everything! For me, it was a stretch of the imagination that they would all have kept silent for 20 years.
Overlooking this however, it's a very watchable, sometimes gory film that should keep you entertained for a while.
Review of The Dare
