BLUMHOUSE’S TRUTH OR DARE
PG-13, 100 minutes. Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. In “Truth Or Dare,” a bunch of college kids go to Mexico and come back with something awful, contagious, and beyond the reach of Pepto-Bismol, or broad-spectrum antibiotics. It’s a curse, creating a fatal vector that moves from person to person, placing “Truth or Dare” in the same general category as “Final Destination” or “The Ring,” though in this case the internal logic of the movie is complex, confusing, and as a result the movie is not very much fun. And though most of the characters exist only to be killed, they are generic and disposable even by the standards of cut-rate horror movies. Good girl Olivia (Lucy Hale) wants to spend spring break working for Habitat for Humanity, but her hard-partying roommate and friend Markie (Violett Beane) lures her south of the border, with a bunch of other undergrads. In Mexico, a guy at a bar lures them to an old mission, where they are affixed with the curse that follows them back to the States and forces them to play endless rounds of truth or dare. If you try to opt out, you die. If you play, you might be asked to kill someone else, prompting participants to ponder (theoretically) whether they will submit to the kill-or-be-killed ethos of the situation. Suffice it to say, there is a lot of killing, and the students prove vulnerable to the pull of ruthless self-interest. This could be wicked, gruesome fun, but there isn’t much of that in “Truth or Dare,” which gets lost in the needlessly knotty and constantly shifting rules of the curse. — Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Inquirer CLAIRE FOLGER/ENTERTAINMENT STUDIOS VIA AP PG-13, 101 minutes. Niantic, Madison Art Cinemas, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Stonington, Lisbon. With the dark and enchanting animated parable “Isle of Dogs,” Wes Anderson raises his little personal world to new, finely detailed heights. The film is a stop-motion project like Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” full of marionette-like images and effects that are all the more impressive because of their high degree of difficulty. On the stern orders of Tokyo’s Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura), countless dogs suffering a mysterious “snout fever” are banished to nearby Trash Island. Strays, former house pets, watchdogs, show dogs and guard dogs have been sent there ostensibly for concerns about public health. The truth