Many years back, with films like “Hostel” and the “Saw” series, we had the advent of what was called torture porn. This basically involved scenes of people being strapped down and gruesomely mutilated.

With 2017’s “Truth or Dare“, we have what I would call “self torture porn.“

The plot is basic enough. Several college students go to a house rumored to have been the location of many deaths in the eighties. The young people who died back then were reportedly playing a game of truth or dare. So, of course, our protagonists decided to do the same.

You can see where this will go, which is nowhere good. It turns out there’s some kind of supernatural entity in the house that forces people to play the game. If people don’t do the dares, they are horribly killed. Is a tough choice, because the dares are things like put your hand on a stove burner, or pour acid on your head. (It’s worth noting that there are few requests for truth in the games of truth or dare played in the film.)

What I liked about the movie is that it didn’t limit its setting to only the house (a frequent cost cutting measure with these kinds of films). After the first death, the kids get away and some of them track down one survivor of the first slaughter. (She’s played by a horror queen—”Nightmare on Elm Street’s” Heather Langenkamp.)

At first, I found the characters largely unlikable and idiotic, but they grew on me as time went on.

I may be getting old, but I will confess that some of these scenes really bothered me. I have never turned off a movie midway through because I was disturbed by it, but I really wanted to do so with this one. There’s some graphic stuff you can really feel in your bones.

It’s by no means a great film, but some effort was put into it and it did what it set out to do.

Best line: “I just ate a person’s skin.”

(By the way, there is a 2018 Blumhouse film also called “Truth or Dare”. That is a different movie.)