As indicated by the recent announcement that there’s going to be a “John Wick 5,” death in the movies simply isn’t what it used to be. There’s no longer anything final about it; increasingly, it’s not anything at all. At the end of “John Wick 4,” John Wick didn’t just get killed — he seemed really dead, as in let’s-put-a-fork-in-the-franchise dead. But, of course, the moment you had that thought, and the word “franchise” entered your brain, you just knew it couldn’t be. It would leave too much money on the table. The awesome death of John Wick needed to be rendered null and void so that Keanu Reeves could come back.
“Until Dawn” is a gimcrack horror-movie hodpepodge that reflects the very same attitude towards death. (It doesn’t matter! Just push reset!) But the film doesn’t pull that cheap trick at the end; it does it all the way through. “Until Dawn” is about five college students who are trapped in a mystical woodland house that looks like a roomy bed-and-breakfast, and the film might be described as a slasher-movie version of “Groundhog Day” — or, more specifically, the Andy Samberg “Groundhog Day” variation “Palm Springs,” since in that one each episode ended with the Samberg character getting offed, knowing full well that he would wake up all over again.
The fun of the “Groundhog Day” format is seeing the hero gradually shift events to take charge of his destiny. But “Until Dawn” doesn’t pretend to operate on that level of ingenuity. In the house, which is haunted by every breed of mad killer and nightmare spook from the last three decades, an hourglass turns upside down, and when the sand runs out (it takes about 20 minutes of screen time) it means that one night has passed. By that point, the characters will have all been killed. The killings are reasonably gruesome: stabbings, gougings, and at one point the bodies start exploding, leaving blood and guts everywhere. But then a set of gears will flip the hourglass, and the next night begins, and the characters wake up and start all over again.
Except that they don’t repeat the night with intricate variations. The next night is just…another random killing spree. With different cliché slashers and demons. And that’s the entire movie. The characters are fighting for their lives, but even if they do die they’re not really dead. The result is there’s absolutely nothing at stake.
“Until Dawn” is based on the popular PlayStation 4 video game that came out in 2015. And while the staggering success of “A Minecraft Movie” has now placed video games front and center in Hollywood’s dream of a future, “Until Dawn” could be a textbook demonstration of what happens when a video-game movie goes wrong. The game’s original narrative was devised by the cult filmmaker Larry Fessenden (“Wendigo”), working with Graham Reznick, the two of whom culled the game’s house-of-ghouls slasher dynamic from sources like “Evil Dead II” and “Poltergeist,” and from games like “Resident Evil” and “Silent Hill” that had already been made into movies. Which means that “Until Dawn,” as a movie, is based on a game that’s based on movies, some of which were based on games. Have we squeezed the juice out of this lemon yet?
The characters have landed at the demonic woodland house because they’re searching for Melanie (Maia Mitchell), who disappeared a year ago and is the sister of Clover (Ella Rubin), who with her grim tenacity would be the final girl if this movie had one. At the house, Clover and her buddies discover a “Missing” poster of Melanie, along with “Missing” posters of a host of other young people. But none of that comes to much.
The first night, the characters are menaced by a bald hulk in overalls, wearing a clown mask with the mouth area (including his teeth) smashed in. That’s just lovely, but he’s basically as generic as a slasher can be. In the next episode, they’re possessed by “spirits,” which means that their bodies go flying. Still to come are a witch, a floating ghost, a gothic Victorian room stocked with dolls and baby heads and an old basinet and a rocking chair with a stuffed clown in it, as well as an encounter with gnashing zombie creatures who are billed as wendigos, I guess in homage to Fessenden’s 2001 movie.
In case you require clarifying dialogue, the characters never stop busting each other’s chops or saying things like, “We’re dealing with some really fucked-up shit here!” I expect “Until Dawn” to do a weekend’s worth of business, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good horror film. It’s monotonous and derivative and numbing. It’s a grab bag that traps you in a version of hell, though the problem isn’t that the movie is like a video game. It’s that it’s like a video game that’s got no game.
