Halloween Havoc: Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE Series (1986-2017) Part 1

One of the common attitudes toward filmmakers in Hollywood over the years is "what have you done for me lately?" Sure, there are filmmakers who make such a big blockbuster that they get handed blank check after blank check no matter how many bombs fall afterwards (see: "Wachowski"), but due to the vibes and politics nature of who's in and who's out, aspiring filmfolk can find themselves quickly sinking beneath the waves of indifference. But what of the amateur/underground videomakers? More specifically, what about those cult (in the stricter sense of the term) movie makers who get written up in zines and websites that are getting rarer and rarer as the years tick by. It's the "gore-tuers" who I'm interested in this Halloween.

The '80s were notorious for harsh cinematic censorship, even in countries like the US, where censorship is unconstitutional and our film rating / censor board, the MPAA, had to do some sweaty gymnastics to dance around that fact. Because of the inevitable march of movies going direct to video, low-budget movie makers suddenly didn't need to worry about appealing to cinema owners or being advertised in newspapers. Cinemas and papers had strict rules about what could be shown and advertised in this pre-internet age, and now these movies could just flip the bird at the ratings board and do whatever they wanted to. Since graphic violence in independent horror movies was something the MPAA loved to come down with all of their self-righteous fury, young video makers wanted to do violent shit. Such as the infamous VIOLENT SHIT (1989), from Germany's own Andreas Schnaas.

BLOOD CULT (1985) was the first shot on video horror movie sold directly to video stores during that boom time in which mom & pop shops were ravenous for product. Horror was big business in the '80s and on video it was a killing field. BLOOD CULT was hugely successful and even spawned a less successful sequel, REVENGE (1986). It also made a lot of people realize they could do that too. One of those people was Florida man Tim Ritter, who had already made a Super 8 movie DAY OF THE REAPER (1984), that he self distributed on VHS (some of you remember the days of the back page ads for self-published VHS horrors in Fangoria). He followed this up with a Super 8 anthology, co-directed with frequent collaborator Joel Wynkoop, TWISTED ILLUSIONS (1985). This was also self-distributed, so I feel like BLOOD CULT still retains the crown for micro-budget indy horror breaking that plastic ceiling. Particularly since it was so broadly released that every single video store (except for Blockbuster, which wasn't a real threat until about 1989) had a copy on their shelves. They wouldn't hang on to that crown long.

Ritter's biggest success came with a shot on 16mm, massively distributed on VHS, movie called TRUTH OR DARE? (1986). If you rented horror movies from your local video stores back then, you know exactly what the box looks like, you probably rented it and very probably told all of your friends about it, and they told their friends. It was kind of a big deal in certain circles at the time. With those two Super 8 films under his belt, a then 18 year old Tim Ritter, wrote and directed the story of an average shlub, Mike Strauber, who snaps and embarks on a murder spree after he finds his girlfriend cheating on him. If you have seen any of Tim Ritter's outings, this may sound very familiar, as this is literally the set-up for a many of his movies. They say "write what you know" and yeah, some girl traumatized the shit out of this guy.

Following TRUTH OR DARE?, Ritter made an excellent quasi-remake titled KILLING SPREE (1989), shot on 16mm and starring the greatest name in horror, the late Asbestos Felt. Ritter then made a variety of sequels (see below) and a few other odd projects, including an unexpected turn with a Christian SOV horror movie titled RECONCILLED THROUGH THE CHRIST (2005). And finally his last proper movie I DARED YOU! TRUTH OR DARE 5 (2017). When I say "proper", I mean that I'm excluding movies where he just directed segments in anthologies or a movie with four other credited writers. (As you may have guessed, this is really just an excuse to get me out of talking about 2021's SHARKS OF THE CORN).

To Ritter's credit, the TRUTH OR DARE series has never done the obvious thing of simply rehashing what worked in the first movie ad nauseum. Well, except for the whole "cheating women driving dudes crazy" thing. Anything you'd like to share with the group, Tim?

So what has Tim Ritter done for us lately? Before we dive into 5, let's recap the series for those folks who aren't David Zuzelo.

TRUTH OR DARE? A CRITICAL MADNESS (1986): In this first entry, we are introduced to a schlub named Mike Struber (John Brace), a suit and tie guy in a copper '70 Firebird Trans Am. Yeah, it's not the finest car ever built, but damn it sure looks cool. Mike comes home to his hot wife Sharon (Mary Fanaro) banging his buddy Jerry (Bruce Gold). After being told that their marriage is toast, which seems obvious, Mike tears away in his bitchin' TA to go have flashbacks on all of the red flags that have gone up recently. And also some memories of self-mutilation as a child, for some reason. 

While driving aimlessly, Mike picks up a very friendly hitchhiker with big... hair and takes his hot date to a campsite. Jesus dude, really? I'm beginning to understand why Mike got dumped. As they sit on logs, the hitchhiker suggests that they play Truth or Dare. Things start simply enough and quickly spiral out of control with Mike being dared to slash his chest with a knife, cut off a finger and rip his tongue out. Mike, the schlub that he is, figures he can dare her to lift up her blouse, to which she merely untucks her top, without exposing a centimeter of flesh. Seems fair.

Finally, Mike is found alone, by the park ranger, covered in blood and screaming "Truth or dare! Truth or dare!" Thirteen months later in the Sunnyvale Mental Institution, Mike's doctors talk about how well he has healed (apparently he had his finger and tongue reattached...?) and how budget cuts make him a great candidate to release back into the wild! Just an FYI for those unaware, this is a commentary on the popular and pervasive GOP desire to cut state spending on mental health services in the '80s, resulting in mass closures of mental institutions and the dumping of their patients out on to the streets to become the homeless people that the same politicians and voters then complained about. But I digress.

Of course, the first thing Mike does after getting his walking papers is stalk his wife. This leads to a great little HALLOWEEN-inspired sequence in which Mike is in her house with a large carving knife, trying to kill her and Jerry without being seen. He kills Jerry, but is surprised by Sharon who slices open his stomach in spite of her terrible culinary knife skills. This leads to Mike being patched up and thrown back into the looney bin. Mike plays Truth or Dare with some imaginary inmates (one being the late, great Asbestos Felt) before carving up half of his face, creating a copper mask in the asylum's metal shop (is that really a thing that asylums had?) before managing to escape past an angry, racist guard (Joel Wynkoop, Tim's buddy and the original choice for the lead). Once Mike busts out, he goes on a wild killing spree while the bumbling local detectives try to chase him down without destroying the town. They are mostly successful.

At one point Mike steals a '79 Bonneville land yacht and runs down a baby in a stroller and its mother (the shot of the mother being run over was deleted from the finished film). He also gets into a chase with some punks and blows up their car, shoots a group of people waiting for a bus with an M16, smacks an old lady with a morning star, because she berates him for running into her trash cans (a direct reference to 1984's REPO MAN), chainsaws the face of a little leaguer (where did he get all this stuff?) all on his way to get to his wife's house so he can finally kill her for dumping him. Seems a bit excessive, but everybody has their own ways of coping. Unlike the other entries, I can't in good conscience post spoilers because if you haven't seen it, you should. There are lots of great little moments written into the script that you would never see in your average low-budget DTV horror movie, particularly these days. Additionally, some of the actors are surprisingly good and Brace does a nice job straddling the line between serious and campy as Mike.

The film was written by a 17 year old Ritter, who had made two self-distributed Super 8 movies prior. The second was TWISTED ILLUSIONS (1985), an anthology co-directed with Joel Wynkoop. One of the stories was the original short, titled A CRITICAL MADNESS, that would go on to be expanded into TRUTH OR DARE? Ritter, driven to get this film produced for any amount of money, managed to hype the project in the local press and even Variety. Eventually he secured funding of $350,000 ($1.1 million in 2025 dollars) through a local video distributor looking for new product to sell direct to video stores across the nation. Ritter had been planning on shooting on a budget of $60,000 ($6,000 if things didn't go well), so this was a huge amount of money that allowed Ritter to shoot on 16mm with a full crew, including veteran special effects master Bob Shelly. Shelly had worked on classics like CANNIBAL APOCALYPSE (1980) and GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) before signing on with Tim. This allowed Ritter to do things like a car explosion with a no-suit burn gag, adding significant production value to his little movie.

Like so many stories we hear about indy filmmaking, not everything went well. The make-up effects team that were brought in for the copious gore effects were not able to do all of the things that they promised at the outset. Shelly offered to take over some of the work and, according to Tim, completely saved the production, in spite of having to scale back some of the more ambitions effects. The troubles didn't stop there as the producer (Yale Wilson) who was hired by the backer was constantly at odds with the gory horror aspects of the script. One of the things he fought against was the scene in which Mike runs down a mother and child. Originally the scene was supposed to show Mike targeting them and deliberately running them down in his stolen car. Wilson took issue with this and forced Ritter to change it to look like hitting the baby carriage was an accident and running over the mother was a crime of opportunity. After more conflicts over 12 days of a 14 day shoot, Ritter was banned from the set and locked out of the editing room. This resulted in the film being toned down with the shot of the mother being run over omitted completely. Wilson even went so far as to strip Ritter's name from the credits, replacing it with his own name. Forced to take legal action, Ritter received a judgment in his favor, but not before the film master was completed and the retail tapes had already been manufactured with Wilson's name on them. Even with all of the issues, this is a pretty amazing accomplishment for an untrained, 18 year old kid. It also explains why he has spent most of his decades-long career shooting on video with non-professionals.

WICKED GAMES (1994): In this second entry, a schlub named Gary (Kevin Scott Crawford) discovers his wife cheating on him. His cop friend (Joel Wynkoop) helpfully tells him that he might take after his cousin, the mass murderer Mike Strauber, who is still locked up in the Sunnyvale sanitarium. Uhhh, thanks? Folks start getting killed by a man in a new copper mask (not Mike's old one) until (SPOILER) we find out that it's not one, but three killers using Mike's MO. In a patented Tim Ritter double twist, we discover that it's all just crazy Mike's fantasy, with him imagining his doctors (including Wynkoop) having followed in his footsteps, randomly killing folks. (/SPOILER) Sadly, it feels like it was just done as a fun weekend project with minimal script and production values, even by micro-budget SOV standards. The best bit, aside from the fun double twist, is a scene in which a victim is stabbed with a machete and then falls on top of a lawn sprinkler which goes right through the cut and starts spraying blood. Sometimes you have to just take what you can get.

SCREAMING FOR SANITY (1998): In the third in the series, Ritter gets much more ambitious than part 2, and makes the main character a schlub named Clive (Ken Blanck), the husband of the woman and father of the child that Mike runs over with his car in part 1. Honestly, I think this is a brilliant premise for a sequel that would directly follow TRUTH OR DARE? The rather offhand murder of Clive's wife and child didn't mean much to Mike, but it had a massive impact on the mental health of husband and father, Clive, just as you expect it would. That fateful event caused him to lose his shit and be confined to the very same Sunnyvale nuthouse that Mike currently resides in. Coincidentally, he is released on his own recognizance at the very same time that Mike's doctor, Dr. Hess (Joel Wynkoop) decides to beat up Mike because he bears some very deep resentment after Mike got past him when he was just an orderly in the first film. As a psychologist, you'd think Dr. Hess would recognize his festering guilt complex. Not only is Dr. Hess fired, but he gets excoriated in the press with all too close-to-the-bone accusations of being the weak link that allowed Mike to go on his killing spree.

Clive is tortured by hallucinations, bouts of self-mutilation and suddenly people start getting killed by a man in a copper mask. Unlike part 1, it just seems to be random idiots who are either profiting off of the true crime story of the Sunnyvale killer, or some loser goth chick who desperately wants to marry Mike Strauber, sending him repeated fan mail, in spite of the fact that he never bothered to write back to her. Additionally, the disgraced Dr. Hess seems to be a target too, and is being stalked by the killer. At one point, Hess' semi-estranged, much-too-young to be into pudgy, balding middle age dudes, wife is kidnapped and nailed to a wall in a warehouse restroom. Damn, that's just cruelly unhygienic. In a nice twist (SPOILER) Dr. Hess kills Clive, who actually is the killer, and he was driven to murder by his own doctor and his sister in the hopes that Clive would kill Dr. Hess, for "letting" Mike escape the asylum! The double twist is limited here to simply having Clive's sister being haunted by Clive's ghost holding the copper mask. (/SPOILER)

While part 2 was rather lackluster, except for the ending, this outing had a lot more effort put into it. Though, I should mention that in spite of the warning at the beginning of the movie that what you are about to see contains graphic sex and violence (man, if that doesn't take you back to the '90s!), there is no nudity and not much blood. In spite of this, I enjoyed it quite a bit. The plot is surprisingly complex, mercifully free of padding and sports better than average acting for a '90s SOV outing. While watching it, I kept thinking "this is the real sequel to TRUTH OR DARE!" As it turns out, in fact it was the original concept that Ritter had for a sequel that he pitched to the producers of part 1. Apparently, they passed on it, possibly due to the contentious power struggles and litigation during part 1. Even so, I find this somewhat amazing considering how ubiquitous the original was on VHS. I'm pretty sure some folks put their kids through college on that movie and usually sacks of cash will bandage all wounds in any business.

Next Up: Tim Ritter's TRUTH OR DARE Series (1986-2017) Part 2