If you were taken and tortured by a person whose
life you ruined long ago, what would you do?
Sometimes fate doesn’t just serve you a rotten
hand of cards; it stuffs the worst cards down your throat until you choke to death on them. If you’re
lucky, you go to therapy early enough to turn you into Dexter. For the unluckiest of the unlucky,
you get to reach your breaking point years after you’ve been ritualistically brainwashed by
a psychopath and tear down a revenge spiral so fast you forget to have fun along the way.
For Jay, Cat, Adam and Paul, they find themselves at the mercy of a far more sympathetic villain
than anyone expected, meaning they’re in for a world full of schadenfreude and we’re in
for a whole lot of questioning which side of this thing we’re supposed to be on.
Technically, though, they ARE victims of kidnapping and torment, so they’ll need to
put their limited rational thinking to good use and try to escape the karma that’s
been chasing them for twenty years.
I’m going to break down the
mistakes made, what you should do, and how to beat THE CAPTOR in THE DARE.
On the street of Normal Rockwell’s nightmares, an unknown threat stalks down the sidewalk, coming to
a foreboding stop outside one house in particular. Inside, JAY and his family are preparing for bed
when he realizes he left the book he was going to read to his kids out in the car. He calls out
to his wife about the keys, but she doesn’t answer. And something darts past the window.
He leaves the room for a second and when he returns their front door is standing wide open.
He hears something crash in the kitchen and enters to find his wife knocked out on the floor.
Whatever happened, it ain’t enough to light a fire under Jay’s butt to do anything about it. And
apparently, he never taught his kids how to dial 911. It’d be an excellent time for that, no?
Apparently not. He hears his older daughter scream from upstairs and races to the rescue with
a kitchen knife and the peripheral vision of Helen Keller. He finds her in the fetal position
under her bed, hiding from something. So, of course, he lies belly down on the
floor – the optimum defensive position…
Does Jay even HAVE tactical senses? And
you – child of our loins – what the heck are you doing? Seriously, have you ever
known a kid not to scream their head off about a boogeyman in the closet.
At least whisper us a heads up.
Even though he has a knife poised in his
hand, ready to strike the very meaty blood bag of a leg behind him, Jay attempts to
stand instead and takes a brutal knock out punch for his efforts. Nighty night, Jay.
He wakes up bagged and chained to a wall in Pyramidhead’s basement. The floor is made of sand
and eroded bone dust, the walls are caked in crap, vomit and blood. And he has three cell-ys
- Adam, a super trooper washout, Cat, the human equivalent of a blizzard wind, and Paul,
this tenderized deli lunch special that provides everyone with a white noise soundtrack
of wheezing coughs and painful moans.
Dude looks like he just left the gladiator
pit after going toe to toe with a hyena.
Totally understandable once we meet Credence,
one of the worst and most psychotic kidnappers ever committed to film, who has recently captured
a young boy named Dom to raise as his own. Calling Credence’s parental style tough love would be
like calling napalm a type of firecracker.
Dom has just escaped a chained fate similar to
Jay’s when Credence arrives with dinner. He tells Dom that if he behaves, he’ll get to live here
in one of the radioactive barrel closets from Fallout 4. If he doesn’t, he’ll go back in
the pit to be chained and beaten. Decisions, decisions. Then, he gives Dom dinner.
Just the first of many, many lessons in parenting brought to you by horrific
hurt and someone’s twisted imagination.
In Credence’s industrial sized barn, he
tosses Dom a bag full of pig offal to sell for market. When the boy drops it,
he paints the kid red with swine blood.
It’s like the reverse of Harry’s lessons
in Dexter. How to raise a psychopath. And here I thought you just had to let them binge
watch reality television at a formative age.
Credence makes Dom thank him for the terrible
treatment, reminding the kid that his parents never wanted him and Credence is all he has.
Also, if Dom ever upsets him, he’ll kill him.
Later, when Dom tries to go into the basement
and doesn’t want to talk to Credence at dinner, Credence slams a fork into Dom’s thigh.
You know, evil dad things.
Down in the basement, Jay tests the
length of his restraints and asks for details about their situation. He gets…pretty
much nothing, except that they’ve been there long enough to give up on trying to escape.
The lights flicker to warn of their torturer’s impending arrival, but Adam cryptically warns
Jay that it’s not their Captor who actually does the torturing. A piece of meat is
tossed in from the door as dinner.
I know things are looking grim, but
could you maybe NOT drag our one pork chop through the dirt before giving me some?
Jay asks if they’re going to give Paul any. Cat tells Jay their captor gives Paul some sort
of injections to keep him alive…which tells us something pretty critical about whoever
is keeping us here – there’s a purpose to this madness. An end goal. Figuring out what it
is is our second priority…right after trying to untie ourselves from the wall.
Paul may be shredded and torn, but he isn’t missing any pieces, nor is
anyone else, so we’re probably not in a cannibal situation. The only other person here
exhibiting wounds is Adam, so if it were me, I’d be asking Adam what triggered our captor
to attack him, and then I’d be calling out to Paul to tell us about his encounters. In a minute,
we’ll see that Paul’s lips are actually sewn shut, which means we will need to meet at the ends of
our chains to cut his mouth open before he can tell us anything. Still, it’s worth the effort.
Adam and Cat warn Jay that if he tries anything, or doesn’t eat, he’ll end up like Paul, but
Jay declares he’ll escape or die trying. Yeah, no crap. Who’s just waiting around
to be murdered? This isn’t The Menu.
Jay’s in a worse spot than he realizes, because
two of his three cellmates are batcrap insane. Cat and Adam have been in here so long they’re hurling
insults at each other and laughing about them AND rehashing old war stories, like how as a teenager,
Cat used to catfish married men into meeting her so she could ruin their marriages. Not to mention,
the whole “they stopped trying to escape” thing.
He should be peppering them with questions about
how they came to be here. Not just how they were kidnapped, but what’s happened since they
arrived, how long have they been here, has there been a pattern of the Captor coming and going,
and what triggered the freak to score Paul’s flesh like a piece of beef for Korean barbeque.
The point right now is information gathering. We can’t Leroy Jenkins our way out of this
makeshift animal cage. If we want to survive, we have to become the Sherlock Holmes
of our own salvation. Look for clues, track patterns, and plan our attack wisely.
Upstairs, Credence waves one more red flag in Dom’s face before he suddenly becomes
ill, leaving his keys within Dom’s reach. The kid bolts for the front door. He’s so small
he has to use a table to reach the top lock…but only a few feet from the house, Credence warns
him that if he leaves, he’ll never be welcomed back. Credence’s taunting manipulation about
Dom’s parents not wanting him scares the kid crapless and he returns to the house, giving in
completely to the idea of being Credence’s son.
Daddy Dearest shares a calculated
crumb of affection with Dom, and promises the kid that he’ll never let
anyone hurt him…an emotional manipulation tactic that works like a charm on a still
developing brain already traumatized by abuse.
God this is hard to watch.
The only way to combat this level of psychological indoctrination is to nurture and
protect an untouchable idea within you that the person who is trying to brainwash you is wrong.
This idea could take the form of a loved one, a place, a goal, or even an unshakeable idea
of who we could be. Sort of like a real world version of the token from Inception. A way
to tell dark fantasy from reality, truth from the lie you’re being broken into believing.
Of course, that’s a lot to ask of most adults, let alone a kid with no family and nowhere to go.
Let’s pause right here to discuss the rabid dog in the room. If you are a minor in an
abusive situation, there ARE resources available to help you escape and overcome.
Like murdering your parent in their sleep with a kitchen knife.. Or… You could alert
your case worker if you’re in foster care or have been adopted. Whether it’s a biological
or legal arrangement, if they aren’t receptive, call 911 and/or the Childhelp National CA Hotline,
if you’re in the United States. If your guardians won’t allow you to use the phone, contrive a way
to go somewhere – a library or other public space, or wait until you get to school – where you can
ask to borrow a phone. Or talk to a guidance counselor, or google criminal lawyers that work
with child A cases and who have various resources that can help extricate you from your situation.
Just remember in the meantime that you CAN survive without the affection of an adult in your life,
and you’re worth more than the meager scraps and bad adult may toss you. If you’re going to
murder your abusive parent, try to do so in a way that doesn’t make you the prime suspect.
Back in the basement, Jay notices a camera embedded in the wall and starts ranting
at it, taunting their captor to reveal himself. He flips the camera off and
the lights waver. The door creaks.
Their captor enters, wearing what I can
only describe as a mask made from the stuff scraped off bus station bathroom
floors. As you can probably tell, this guy ain’t Credence…so who could he be? Hmmmm…
He drags what’s left of Paul into the center of the room. Jay demands to know if his
family’s okay, but Eyes Wide Open over here points to Cat and hands her a knife. He
drags his finger across his chest ominously.
He compels Cat to slice off a piece of
Paul’s flesh, revealing what I think is another clue to our situation. Forcing US
to torture each other is likely punishment, suggesting our captor may know us from
before and see this as some sort of revenge…
…of course, we can worry about all
the “whys” later in therapy…after we’ve taken that knife he just handed us and
slammed it suddenly through his neck. Or, after we’ve been shoved to our knees, giving
us a very clean line of sight to the femoral artery in his leg. A deep, sudden slice
could bleed him in less than two minutes.
Instead, Cat gets sent back to the corner
and the Captor beckons Jay forward. The Captor tosses the blade at Jay’s feet as Cat
and Adam warn him not to do anything stupid.
How about you pick up some good old fashioned
pocket sand while you bend down to pick up that knife? Toss a bit in his face right
before you send that blade into his heart.
No. That’d be too obvious.
Bet you wish you had pocket sand now, don’t ya, Jay? Or even that bone
shard you were digging with earlier.
More importantly, WHY ARE YOU HESITATING? Stab him
again while he’s looking at his arm. Stab until he takes that knife from you. Stab somewhere that’ll
really hurt him. Gore his nads. Plunge and drag the knife through his abdomen spilling his guts.
Go for his femoral artery or his Achilles tendon, or even the INSIDE of his arm where the
brachial artery is. You’ve already attacked him – in for a penny, in for a pound, I say.
It's too late for anything like that. The Captor takes the knife, knocks Jay back,
then drags Cat into the middle. He makes Adam torture her by forcing a cockroach
down her throat through a plastic tube.
After the Captor has left, Jay stomps on
the cockroach and discovers a razorblade hidden inside. He immediately sets to work cutting
through the cord keeping him attached to the wall without giving a single flying freak of a thought
to the security camera watching everything. The Captor stomps in, but Jay’s already freed himself.
He shoves past the Captor and into the hallway only to find the door leading upstairs locked.
He sees a ventilation shaft in the ceiling and wriggles into it, but it’s flimsy and can’t
take his bodyweight. The screws break, and he’s knocked unconscious when the
floor introduces itself to his face.
Look, I completely empathize with that nebulous
desire NOT to take a human life.. okay maybe not, but when you’re not trapped six feet from
a man being systematically relieved of his nerve endings one at a time. He’s a
piece of living proof that your tormentor WILL end your life only long, long, LONG
after you’ve stopped wanting to live it.
There was a moment, when the Captor went to Cat
instead of chasing Jay, that Jay could have turned around and SLAMMED his head into the concrete
wall so hard he showered Cat in gray stuff. Or disoriented the Captor long enough to get
him on the ground and curb stomp his head in.
Running IS a great idea if you know you
have a clear means of escape. If you don’t, you’ve just cornered yourself in a room
with two lap dogs, an almost-corpse, and Magic Mike’s psychotic body double.
Jay wakes up with a heavy length of chain tying him to the wall this time. Cat asks
if he found a way out, but of course he didn’t. The Captor enters and allows Adam
to unchain himself. He hands Adam an ax, then wraps a meaty hand around Jay’s throat
and lifts him up the wall before dropping him.
Adam advances.
Anndddd…just like that, we’ve learned the same lesson Chelsea learned
in Do Not Reply – sometimes people become so institutionalized, the best thing you can do for
them, is NOT include them in your escape plans.
The Captor holds up Jay’s hand and
gestures for Adam to nail him to the wall.
Then, Adam puts himself back in his own
restraints. Like I said – institutionalized.
When he wakes up, Jay rips
his hands off the wall.
This is why we don’t squander our
opportunities to wreck crap when we get them.
Jay asks for more information about
the Captor – like he should have done about two brutal tortures ago.
Paul rips the sutures on his mouth open so he can speak, but only manages to
whisper the word “Horse” before he dies. Adam tells Jay that the Captor has a horseshoe
burn on his hand, that he saw it when Jay accidentally ripped the guy’s glove off.
We suddenly cut back twenty years to find Jay, Cat, Adam, and Paul sitting around a
campfire in the woods, telling stories about a crazy old geezer who killed a kid
using a scalding chamber and now stalks the woods looking for victims.
Dun-dun-duh! The Captor is none other than an adult Dom, who these four
bottom dwellers met back when they were kids.
Oh, but they didn’t JUST meet him. They
did a little torturing of their own.
To join their depraved breakfast club, they
made him complete a series of screwed up dares that endow schoolyard bullying with a
suggestion of innocence it doesn’t deserve.
Guess I just hung out with all the right
kids growing up – these little miscreants are so grotesque they make ME want to
commit some human rights violations.
Dom’s home life wasn’t much better than it was
with Credence. And eventually, the four demon spawn who tortured him came back for one more
crack at a lonely kid desperate for a friend.
Cat lured him into the woods to a dilapidated
farmhouse where the others peer pressured him to go inside.
Turns out, THEY’RE the reason Credence was able to capture and
brainwash him for the last twenty years.
So…we’re switching sides here, yes? We’re
gonna help Dom get the revenge he deserves?
Honestly, with all four of his tormentors
contained, it’s as easy as welding the door shut and watching over camera as they slowly
starve until they get so ravenous, one of them gnaws through their rope and starts divvying
out choice cuts of Paul…and then each other.
If Dom hadn’t lived the majority of
his life in a technological dead zone, I’d say that while that was all happening,
we could get to work dismantling their lives digitally so that their legacies are tarnished,
and no one remembers them after they die.
Things only got worse for Dom when he became
a teenager. He learned that Credence doubled down on their living arrangement by setting his
parents on fire and watching them burn to death, so Dom truly had nowhere to go.
And when Dom dared to finally leave, Credence tried to teach him a lesson by
using the scalding chamber in his barn.
This is why you don’t announce your
plans to leave an abusive home. You wait until that idiot's asleep OR knock
him out and tie him up before leaving.
Dom was saved at the last second by
Credence’s illness, and it was only then that he lost that last scrap of sanity
rolling around somewhere in his brain.
He took burned sheets of Credence’s skin and
glued them into the crude mask he wears…and went searching for the other bullies in his life.
That’s a lot of wrong turns in one lifetime. So many so fast, I might call it contrived…if I
hadn’t watched Running Scared once upon a time.
Back in the basement, Jay tells the others they
need to apologize, hoping it’ll inspire Dom to let them go. Dominic comes in wielding a stun baton.
Jay begs Dom’s forgiveness…but the big guy’s just not feeling it.
*Sigh* I guess since I’d have to leave it here if I didn’t go back to trying to help these
walking fester puffs of cruelty survive, so let’s play both sides here just to keep it interesting.
Dom prepares for his next act of revenge. He drags Cat into the center of the room
and motions Jay forward. In his hand, he holds a syringe full of some sort of
saline fluid filled with spider eggs.
Hammurabi’s code – a spider for a
spider…erm, I mean. Bad Dominic. Bad.
Also, again. If you really don’t wanna do this
to Cat, how about you pop that syringe right into Dom’s neck before he can react, Jay?
That mask restricts his field of vision, so it’s a calculated risk to disorient
him long enough to take him down.
Unfortunately, even revenge this gross
doesn’t scratch that itch for Dom. He notices Paul’s dead body and gets so mad,
he pops Paul’s head like a stress ball.
A little while later, Dom sees Adam stab Jay
on the camera monitor and rushes in to punish them for messing with his toys.
It’s a trap. As Dom reaches for him, Jay wraps around the waist, calling
to the others to grab the hose.
Instead of seizing that blade in the small
of Dom’s back and disemboweling or paralyzing him with it, Adam goes with the…piggyback
riding slam-me-into-the-wall position. Sure, let me just sacrifice my stability, balance
and NOT even gouge his eyes out. USELESS.
Look, I know they’re all traumatized, or
whatever…but how am I supposed to root for someone who doesn’t go for the obvious weapon?
Just leave it out of the scene if they’re not supposed to use it, for god’s sake.
Dom quickly gets the upper hand and holds Adam down. He HANDS CAT A SCALPEL before
telling her to slice Adam’s eye open.
Again – AGAIN – he hands you a sharp weapon
and YOU DON’T EVEN CUT HIM ANYWHERE. Scalpels can cut through nerves – one deep slice
to an arm would render it unusable.
Either these people all failed freshmen biology
– which, to be fair, is totally possible – or they’ve somehow convinced themselves that
working out gives him titanium skin.
Dom goes at Jay with the knife, but Jay
knocks it away. Dom wraps a chain around his neck and begins to crush him when Cat
does the only thing she’s good at.
Don’t let her talk to you like that, buddy.
Dom runs away instead of cutting out her tongue, which frankly shows immense restraint for someone
who fileted a grown man over a number of weeks.
After he leaves, Jay performs
emergency surgery on Adam.
Now. Imagine you just pocket sanded the
broken manchild while he was kneeling in front of you and cut his throat with his own
blade INSTEAD of having to do any of this.
The lights flash and Adam panics, begging for
the knife to defend himself. When Jay won’t give it up, the guys fight. Cat intervenes
in the stupidest way possible.
I mean…PLEASE don’t make me root for them now.
WHO TRIES TO STOP A FIGHT BY BASHING SOMEONE’S HEAD IN WITH A ROCK? Ugh, if it weren’t for all
the horrific child abuse, I’d think this was a comedy, and I’d enjoy it more. So stupid.
Not to mention, you had this big head smashing rock THE WHOLE TIME?! USELESS.
Jay pulls the knife from Dom’s throat, killing him in an act of mercy? I guess?
Then, he walks over to Cat, who he lets just turn the knife on him. She tells him that because
she was a local, she knew Dom was out there, trapped in Credence’s house, being abused
for all those years, and did nothing. None of them did. Which is absolutely correct,
so…who am I supposed to root for here?
Suddenly, Dom wraps his arm around her neck from
behind. Jay once again tries to be sympathetic, telling Dom things can be better. Dom counters
that everyone in Jay’s world is scum and abandoned him, that there’s nowhere to go. Jay coaxes
Dom into letting him take off his mask.
*Laughter* What kinda Calvin Klein male model
bulcrap is this?! “There’s nowhere to go?” Bro, you could be walking the Paris
runways TOMORROW. You could own Hallmark movie sets the day after that.
Jay manages to get the knife away from Dom, but spiders suddenly begin
to pour out of Cat’s mouth.
You had like 45 chances to stab this
guy and you still kill the girl? I feel like Leslie Nielsen wrote this scene.
Dom lays Cat down and decides to really savor those last five seconds of sadism.
I suppose that might as well happen. Maybe he dropped a quarter in there, I don’t know.
Tired of all the “evil” he can’t purge from them, Dom throws down his knife and opens his
arms to let Jay finish him off. Instead, Jay bolts, running through the building looking
for an escape as Dom half-heartedly chases him, LEISURELY injuring him now and then - No, I’m
not joking – until Dom finally tosses him easily over a railing to the cement floor below.
Dom tries to drown him in bloody water…Jay punches him with the blood hose…
…and the chase resumes. Apparently, Jay would rather die fighting…which
I kinda understand, except when a killer’s trying to make it easy for you.
Jay gets the upper hand again and again, even bashing Dom repeatedly in the head with a
metal pail but he can’t quite finish the job…
…and so Dom pursues him into the snowy forest
beyond the house, where he HANDS JAY THE KNIFE AGAIN, points it right at his heart,
and tells him to end it. Jay refuses.
Both of you make up your minds already.
Dom tosses Jay to the ground.
This is basically suicide by cop, and I don’t
concede defeat here, in either direction. Jay goes home to his family because Dom handed him
a get out of jail free card several times until he accepted it…
…but of course, Jay can’t even finish this correctly.
We jump ten years into the future to find Jay’s daughters have taken after the worse
version of their dad, returning to the woods on the tenth anniversary of his abduction. And
of course, someone’s waiting for them.
I think we can all agree the
opportunities and methods Cat, Adam AND Jay had to end this fight on multiple
occasions in a variety of scenarios are too numerous to count. But frankly, they were
scummy humans who kinda had it coming, so…participation trophy for Jay, I guess.
And Dom’s apparently unkillable, so add a Terminator role to his list of reasons to just
kill them and move on with his life already.
For those reasons, I think THE DARE was Beaten.
And remember, NO ONE is worth giving up decades of your life to enacting elaborate
revenge schemes – a bullet, or a welded shut room where they can all starve to death
chained to the wall - would work just fine.
