Adaptations of horror based video games on the big screen should be something of an easy home run as the mixture of twisted lore and beverage spilling jump scares seem fairly sime enough to cross the divide of the two mediums. And yet, while we’ve gotten numerous examples of movies successfully making the shift to consoles (you could argue that if not for Alien: Isolation, we’d have never gotten Alien: Romulus), the reverse hasn’t really been that great.
To be honest, I didn’t really like Five Nights At Freddy’s that much and don’t get me started on the likes of the repeated efforts to translate Resident Evil to screens both big and small; however, the next attempt to realise a game franchise without a controller, Until Dawn, seems to want to keep some of that video game playing experience intact. Can director David F. Sandberg put his Shazam! days behind him and go back to his roots that once brought us Lights Out and Annabelle: Creation? Game on.
Clover Paul (stay with me now) is on a trip with her friends, Max, Megan, Nina and Nina’s boyfriend Abe, in order to retrace the last steps of Clover’s sister, Melanie, who had gone missing in the area a year before. As the mostly tight-knit group (and Abe) banter and tease each other the way a gaggle of young friends usually do, they go through the typical rigmarole that protagonists in these sort of movies do which also includes stopping off at a remote gas station to chat with the creepy owner. However, after pressing on, it becomes apparent that while the group see the trip as sort of an acceptance tour to acknowledge Melanie’s probable death, Clover still believes that there’s a chance she could actually stumble across her missing sibling still alive.
However, they get something of an alarming lead when, after a punishing rainstorm, they find the visitor’s centre of an old mining town named Glore Valley that’s mysterious untouched by the pounding downpour. Being young adults in a horror film, they naturally enter the deserted building and explore only to find various creepy clues that hints that they really shouldn’t be here, but before common sense or even a basic amount of self preservation kicks in, the building snaps it’s trap and all hell breaks loose.
You see, the town of Glore Valley seems to be affected by some sort of curse that sees various monsters, witches and ghoulish occurrences attack anyone who enters until everyone has met a bloody demise. However, that’s not the end of it, because thanks to an extra wrinkle to that curse, a funky time distortion means that once Clover and her buddies are all dead, the night starts over and they have to now face a completely different threat.
However, this state of existence isn’t permanent and if the various waves of masked serial killers, parasites, possession and flesh eating Wendigo kill them all too many times, they’ll become part of the curse themselves.
So first a disclaimer: I have never played the game of Until Dawn so I can’t possibly comment as to how accurate Playstation’s adaptation actually is although I have heard rumblings that a lot of changes have been made. However, while the movie may not be a straight remake of the game, Sandberg has endeavoured to try and implement video game stylings into the film by utilising Groundhog Day style do-overs in order to invoke the feeling of starting over once your character expires. It’s a neat concept that rings true of having to respawn from the previous check point is someone else manages to settle your hash, but weirdly the film makes this the entire backbone of the story, throwing in a giant, clockwork hourglass to really hammer home that time is constantly reversing even though this has nothing whatsoever to do with the original source.
With this in mind, any fans of the game will probably be best served by checking their fandom at the door before taking their seat and trying to enjoy the flick regardless, but for the rest of us, Until Dawn: The Movie seems to evoke something of a reshuffling of all the major points of Drew Goddard’s awesomely subversive Cabin In The Woods as it also delivers a gaggle of diverse creatures for you buck as reality bucks like a disgruntled mule. However, there’s a problem that’ll no doubt raise far more issues than Until Dawn not following the plot of the film and it’s this: this movie is dumb as fuck.
Now, dumb horror movies are ten a penny, but that doesn’t mean that can be any less effective, however, while it’s oddly reassuring to watch a film more interested in jumps and cool monsters in a time where horror has gotten quite lofty, Sandberg curiously chooses to subvert nothing and instead is more than happy to knock out the exact kind of a slick boo-fest that Cabin In The Woods took the piss out of so relentlessly. Fora start, the protagonists are possibly the most punchable gathering of characters I’ve seen in a while with not a single one of them managing to elict a single iota of sympathy for their plight – especially as they go around labelling literally everything as “crazy” or “so fucked up” for the entire film. It also doesn’t help that it immediately hamstrings itself by asking us to empathise with a clingy ex, an asshole boyfriend, a wannabe psychic or someone named Clover Paul and we’re supposed to root for their survival as they blindly march toward their own temporary deaths by making judgement calls worthy of a toddler that’s recently been dropped on its head.
It’s not just the main characters that are dumb too as the evil time-curse itself doesn’t really hang together that well either. If the malevolent restarting of the night means that more and more random monsters start piling on, then shouldn’t the final night be an absolute pile-on of murderous beings? Also, if the various monsters are supposed to be random assailants that range from masked killers and witches to tainted water that makes you explode after drinking it (the best part of the film in actual fact), why is the film so obsessed with eventually turning everybody into ferral Wendigo – the only beastie lifted from the game – if they die enough times? Also, if this whole thing is some unstoppable, supernatural maelstrom, why is Peter Stormare’s creepy psychiatrist wandering around the place, seemingly immune to its horrors, like he’s bought shares in the place?
However, maybe I’m feeling a bit overly kind these days, but while I do enjoy this period of “smart horror”, there was something strangely warming to watch an idiot horror flick whose biggest concern is to deal out cool creatures, plentiful gore and copious jump scares. The world needs horror to pick at the scabs of modern life and throw macabre shade at the establishment, but we also need dumb-ass horror films that mean absolutely nothing and would probably high five itself every time it manages to make someone leap out of their seat with a cheap scare. Slick but stupid, I still had a begrudging grin on my face from silly beginning to idiotic end, it’ll take far less than until dawn for you to forget this one; but it’s fun.
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