Until Dawn is based on a PlayStation story-driven video game that borrows its story and characters from slasher films. So making a movie based on a video game based on horror movies seems pretty circular. So they compromised and made a movie based on video game logic instead. Kinda.

It’s about five friends on a road trip to find a missing member. They wind up in a welcome center and are promptly murdered by a masked killer. They come back to life and try again… and again… and again.

The time loop thing is weird since it’s kind of video game logic… except the Until Dawn video game didn’t have this mechanic. You could save all your friends or lose them along the way. So the movie either doesn’t know that or doesn’t care. Meanwhile, the characters reference time loop movies instead.

The time loop and the various killers just didn’t work for me. Yes, that’s partly me noticing how similar some of their villain iconography is to the game and it being completely out of context… but as a stand-alone story, it’s completely arbitrary. Why is any of this happening, who are these killers, what locations are they in? It’s unexplained and irrelevant to the characters and plot… and thus irrelevant to me. It’s just stuff happening in random places by random killers.

It feels like they were trying to do an homage to horror movie tropes, Cabin in the Woods style. But I’m not sure since the creatures all kind of look the same. But there are passing references that feel like they are pulling from other movies (and games)… but its all half-steps. It feels like they were trying but never committed… and if they did commit, it was vague and arbitrary.

And then there’s a cameo from the game… which if you don’t know the game will mean nothing and seem just as arbitrary as everything else. And if you do know the game, it won’t make sense given how the characters was used in the game.

There is some good blood splatter and exploding bodies that I appreciated. Mostly its well shot with capable enough actors running around random locations, getting killed by random enemies, for random unknowable reasons. This film doesn’t work on its own or as an adaptation, even a thematic adaptation. Skip.

Score: 68