Groundhog Morning

 

Is there anything better than randomly flicking on an under the radar horror film only to discover that it features Peter Stomare? 

And spontaneous combustion?

And bear traps?!

Quick Plot: A young woman crawls out of a hole in triumph only to be murdered by a Leslie Vernon-esque reaper. 

Cut to a set of five attractive dark-haired college students on the road to find Melanie, the same girl we saw clawing her way out of the ground in the prologue. Little sister Clover hasn't been the same since she disappeared. Ex-boyfriend Max, pals Meghan and Nina, and Nina's new, likely short-term boyfriend Abe stop at a gas station where attendant Hill (Stormare!) points them towards an abandoned mining town. Great things always happen in abandoned mining towns!

The group locates an empty hotel and quickly realizes that something is wrong. Melanie's signature graces the guestbook...multiple times, growing more erratic on each line. 

Things get more troubling when the same masked madman shows up to slaughter them all. 

Fear not! The kids wake up to find themselves alive!

Later that night, they die again.

If you're picking up on some Happy Death Day vibes, your senses are working. Based on a video game (I know nothing of such things), Until Dawn is a sort of slasher mashup fueled by some semblance of everybody's favorite thematic word of the moment, trauma. 

The description above might sound fairly terrible, but l found myself pleasantly surprised by Until Dawn. Director David F. Sandberg is no stranger to horror, having made the decent Annabelle: Creation and the (in my opinion) unsatisfying Lights Out. He goes for a much lighter, even bouncy tone here, with a snappy cast of young actors who manage to create real characters amid the chaos. 

Still, there's something that keeps Until Dawn from fully coming together. It's fun. It moves well. I was invested enough in the young cast's fate to root for their survival. But even with the added bonus of last act Peter Stormare, I just never felt like I had my thumb on exactly what Sandberg was going for. The psychological angle of Clover's grief is never taken with enough weight for an emotional catharsis, but the film doesn't fully embrace its zaniness to make it overly memorable. 

Still, I had a good time here, a better one than I expected based on the premise and poster. It's fun!  

 

High Points

There's great joy in watching a familiar setup and realizing you're in for a dozen surprises. The aforementioned spontaneous combustion gave me a full guffaw, but even that didn't quite prepare me for a sudden turn into...wendigos?

Low Points

At a certain point, I realized you could throw all the wendigos in the world at me and I still wouldn't really have a deep emotional connection to Until Dawn

Lessons learned

There's much power to be found in VHS

Don't expect good plumbing from a hotel that hasn't been opened since 1998

The more you look like your partner, the better your odds of survival might be

Rent/Bury/Buy

Until Dawn isn't a movie I'll remember much in a few months, but for its 100 minutes, it gave me a few surprises and even more full body bursts. It's a good time for a lazy afternoon. Find it on Netflix.