Nobody puts baillee in the corner

Cheap Thrills is really about the only good thing to come out of the weird niche of dare horror we endured a few years ago. To give you a little context to this blog post, I’m going to have to give you a super watered down synopsis (I promise I’ll leave the pretentious reviews to The AV Club).

All you really need to know is a down-on-his-luck family man runs into an old friend turned criminal at the local bar, and the two friends are soon dragged into a night of high-stakes dares by a recently married couple. (Imagine if Double Dare only consisted of physical challenges, and there was a lot more blood and a lot less Marc Summers). Oh yeah, and there’s tons of carnage, loads of increasingly disturbing challenges, and Sara Paxton (aka the more accessible Alexis Bledel). But I digress. The really important part is this movie only works because people are unpredictable and can really surprise you (for better and worse).

You never actually know how a person is going to react in any given situation, regardless of how well you know them. You don’t know how far someone will go to provide for their family until they’re faced with that situation. You don’t know which friends are in your life to stay until you face that first real hardship. You don’t know how someone is going to react once you ask them on a date until you make the move. But that’s the fun part, right?

People are complex and vulnerable, and most importantly, they’re human. There’s a lot of going off script. The cast of characters is constantly changing. The endings aren’t always cut and dry. 

And that’s about the only thing you can bet on.