Monthly Archives: May 2025

Clown in a Cornfield Juggles Gore, Heart, and Teen Angst—but Drops a Few Balls

13 Tuesday May 2025

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Eli Craig’s stylish adaptation of the Bram Stoker Award-winning novel lands some bloody punches, but struggles to balance slasher thrills, meta commentary, and character depth.

Adapted from the 2020 novel of the same name by Adam Cesare. Clown in the Cornfield won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Novel and was a prominent addition to the new wave of horror literature. Acquired by Shudder and pushed wider than one would expect for a Canadian teen slasher, the film has high aspirations and plenty to show for it.

Still grieving the loss of her mother, Quinn (Katie Douglas) has been transplanted from Philadelphia to the corn country town of Kettle Springs by her father, the new town’s doctor (Aaron Abrams). Hoping for a new start, they find the town, still stuck in the 90s, has a strange air about it. The adults all seem to have it out for the teens of the town, in particular the group lead by the Mayor’s son, Cole (Carson MacCormac). Much to the town’s chagrin Cole and his friends make internet horror videos, starring Friendo the Clown, the Factory and the Town’s Mascot. After one of their recent after hours shoots in the corn syrup factory, a fire mysteriously started and burned the whole thing down, putting half the town out of work and the teens in the crosshairs of a very angry clown.

A slasher lives and dies (and dies and dies) on its kills and in this teen slasher comedy Director Eli Craig brings his experience from the very fun Tucker & Dale vs Evil and the Adam Scott starring, Omen parody, Little Evil. While the killing is sparse to begin with, the violence ramps up towards the end in fun and inventive ways. There is a surprising amount of heart put into the film and the teen drama between the leads is engaging and affecting. One of the film’s weak points though is the supporting cast, the performances are held well but characters are so thinly drawn which only is highlighted because the leads have such life and depth to them.

Out of the whole Canadian cast, Kevin Durand is the biggest name here and really he’s more of a “Hey, I know that guy!” Durand plays the conservative Mayor obsessed with tradition and hard on the youth. While there isn’t a whole lot for him to do for most of the film’s run, there is one scene towards the end where he gets to really chew the scenery.

Together, Craig and cinematographer Brian Pearson (Final Destination 5, I Am Legend) bring a gorgeous look to the film, it’s probably one of the best looking teen horrors in a long while. Divorced from so many of the bad habits that have plagued the lower tier horror films of the last decade. The action is clear and you are always oriented in the scenes. I know this sounds like faint praise but there are so many slashers aimed at teens that just do not try and end up edited to pieces.

Unfortunately, the film suffers in the act of adaptation, too often you can feel a novel’s pacing and story squeezed into the brisk 96 minutes of the film’s run time. The tone fights with itself throughout flitting between classic slasher, meta comedy and teen drama, doing all three well when it’s happening on screen but all three never coalesce into a singular piece. Friendo never really gets the moments to elevate anywhere near to the likes of Jason or Freddy, or even Art the Clown for that matter. His design is not terribly interesting and the reveal of what’s really going on, while surprising at first, leaves the lore pretty thin and shallow to play in

The Prognosis:

The aspirations to be Scream for this generation are here; the mixture of horror and comedy, generational commentary, teenage cast. As an entry level slasher it does plenty right and with solid direction, inventive kills and charming performances but for more seasoned slasher lovers will be left wanting from Friendo the Clown.

  • Movie Review by Oscar Jack

A Melting Dream: Nightmare in Wax and the Lurid Echoes of Late ’60s Horror

10 Saturday May 2025

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Cameron Mitchell shines amid the decay of a flawed but fascinating low-budget oddity.

By the tail end of the 1960s, horror cinema found itself at a strange crossroads — straddling the last gasps of gothic grandeur while cautiously eyeing the burgeoning grit of a new era. Bud Townsend’s Nightmare in Wax (1969) sits awkwardly between these two worlds, offering a sordid yet visually intriguing piece that, for all its flashes of style, ultimately crumbles under the weight of its own limitations.

At its core, Nightmare in Wax is a lurid revenge tale. Cameron Mitchell — always a reliable hand in low-budget horror — lends the film its most convincing element, embodying Vince Renaud, a once-celebrated actor whose face has been horribly disfigured in a freak accident. Swallowed by bitterness and madness, Renaud retreats into the uncanny embrace of a wax museum, where his obsession with preserving beauty takes on an insidious literalness. Mitchell throws himself into the role with a bruised intensity, managing to elevate dialogue that, in lesser hands, would have collapsed into pure melodrama. His performance is a reminder that even within the most wayward productions, a committed actor can carve out something worth watching.

Visually, Nightmare in Wax occasionally brushes against something far more interesting than its narrative suggests. The cinematography, while often rudimentary, occasionally slips into unexpected pockets of stylisation. The flickering, chiaroscuro lighting of the wax museum sequences conjures a greasy, dreamlike atmosphere — a kind of sun-bleached noir sensibility that suggests a more ambitious film trapped inside the one we actually received. Shots linger just a touch too long on the deformed figures and melted visages, a grotesque fascination that, when paired with the film’s threadbare budget, achieves an uncanny, unsettling texture.

However, these moments are fleeting. The broader construction of Nightmare in Wax is messy and unfocused, with a meandering pace that undercuts its own tension. What might have been an incisive study of madness and celebrity decay is instead rendered clumsy by stilted secondary performances, ham-fisted exposition, and an aesthetic that lurches uneasily between pulp thriller and camp horror. Even the gruesome set-pieces, while conceptually fascinating, lack the polish and menace needed to make them truly memorable.

There is, to be fair, a certain tawdry charm in the film’s audacity — its waxen tableaux of frozen horror and its feverish, sun-drenched grotesquerie — but these alone cannot rescue Nightmare in Wax from its fundamental shortcomings. It remains a curious artifact: a film not without merit, but one whose flashes of inspiration are too isolated to coalesce into something enduring.

The Prognosis:

For those willing to sift through the wreckage, Cameron Mitchell’s performance and the occasional visual flourish offer a glimpse into the strange, transitional state of late-1960s horror. It’s a nightmare, yes — but one that flickers, briefly, with the strange, melting beauty of a dying dream.

  • 1960s Retrospective review by Saul Muerte

A Symphony in Splatter: Langley’s Butchers Trilogy Goes for the Jugular

10 Saturday May 2025

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Director Adrian Langley stays true to his blood-soaked roots in this gleefully gruesome third chapter.

In a genre that thrives on extremity, Adrian Langley’s Butchers trilogy has carved out its own brutal little niche—one not of narrative elegance or thematic innovation, but of bone-crunching, limb-lopping, nerve-shredding excess. With Butchers Book Three: Bonesaw, Langley stays the course, offering up another round of down-home horror where pain is inevitable and escape is unlikely.

Gone are the niceties of plot complexity or emotional nuance. In their place: sinew, shrieks, and gallons of the good stuff—practical effects and prosthetics that drip with a kind of DIY devotion rarely seen in modern horror. Langley doesn’t just lean into the gore; he practically does a cannonball into it. This time, his antagonist is a grotesque butcher on wheels, hacking through anyone in his way from the confines of his roving abattoir van. It’s ridiculous, yes, but it’s also grotesquely entertaining.

The story, such as it is, follows three women caught in the butcher’s path and a small-town sheriff who attempts to make sense of the carnage. There’s a familiar structure here—the cat-and-mouse setup, the slasher’s calculated chaos—but Langley’s real interest lies in the carnage itself. Heads roll. Limbs drop. The camera rarely flinches, and neither does the director.

Where the film stumbles is in its limited character development and tonal rigidity. The sheriff subplot adds some much-needed shape, but our protagonists exist mostly to scream, bleed, and be pursued. Still, in the context of a trilogy where spectacle has always trumped subtext, Bonesaw feels like a natural and—dare it be said—confident culmination of Langley’s rural carnage canon.

This isn’t horror that aims for atmosphere or metaphors. It’s red meat cinema—satisfyingly gnarly, grotesquely tactile, and proud of its splatterpunk DNA. In an era of glossy elevated horror, Butchers Book Three proudly remains low to the ground, in the dirt and the blood, where it has always belonged.

The Prognosis:

Not for the squeamish, but for gorehounds and genre loyalists, Langley delivers precisely what’s on the tin—if that tin were dented, rusted, and soaked through with blood.

  • Movie Review by Saul Muerte

Movie Review: Butchers

Movie Review: Butchers Two: Raghorn

The Island Fades into the Mist

10 Saturday May 2025

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Fernando Trueba’s sun-drenched thriller is a lethargic drift through secrets, sensuality, and squandered potential.

The Mediterranean sun may dazzle, the waves may glitter, and the cast may smoulder with generically attractive tension—but none of it can save The Island from becoming one of the more soporific cinematic experiences. Fernando Trueba, a director with an esteemed filmography, trades narrative vitality for languid ambiance in this inert psychological drama that unfolds like a long, humid sigh.

Set against the postcard backdrop of a Greek island, the film introduces us to Alex, a new waitress at a boutique seaside restaurant. With a femme-fatale allure and an air of mystery, she quickly captures the attention of Enrico, the chef, but is drawn instead to Max, the elusive American manager hiding something in his brooding stares and clenched silences. What follows is less a thrilling triangle than a series of glances, sighs, and ultimately, a glacial unraveling of a secret that arrives with the narrative urgency of a missed ferry.

Trueba clearly intends a slow-burn approach, but what results is barely a flicker. The plot trudges along with the weight of its own self-importance, mistaking inertia for introspection. The sexual tension, which should crackle, barely hums. Conversations are riddled with cryptic hints and evasive stares, yet the payoffs are few and far between. When revelations do come, they feel both undercooked and unearned—mere embers that fail to ignite.

Visually, The Island is polished, occasionally picturesque. The camera lingers lovingly on the sea and stone, the half-lit interiors, the salt-flecked skin of its cast. But the atmosphere, no matter how finely curated, cannot compensate for narrative void. You keep waiting for the film to snap into focus, to finally tap into its thriller DNA. Instead, it drifts—first into lethargy, then into complete emotional disengagement.

The performances are competent, but the characters remain archetypes rather than people. Alex is sultry but shallowly drawn; Max, the American enigma, is more mannequin than man; and poor Enrico spends most of the runtime in a state of aimless suspicion. The film attempts to explore obsession, betrayal, and the burdens of past sins, but only gestures vaguely toward each before retreating back into the blue haze.

The Prognosis:

The Island wants to be a sun-bleached neo-noir, a slow meditation on desire and consequence, but what we’re left with is a whisper of a film—beautifully composed, but hollow and soporific. Sometimes, secrets are better left buried. In this case, the film’s own narrative might have been.

  • Movie Review by Saul Muerte

Ride the Snake Slithers into Darkness, But Never Truly Strikes

10 Saturday May 2025

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Despite bold intentions and strong performances, this slow-burning psychological thriller is too meandering to leave a lasting bite.

Ride the Snake, the latest effort from British filmmaker Shani Grewal, attempts to crawl into the feverish subconscious of grief, guilt, and revenge, but ends up shedding more skin than substance. With an ambitious palette of references, the film isn’t lacking in aesthetic aspirations. Unfortunately, it’s precisely this reverence for genre greats that weighs the narrative down, muddying what could have been a searing, timely story of loss and reckoning.

At its core, the premise is loaded with potential. Harper (Suzanna Hamilton) and her daughter abduct the drunk driver responsible for the death of Harper’s husband, believing they’ve seized justice on their own terms. What follows is not the revenge thriller one might expect, but a slow, deliberate psychological descent. The pacing dares to crawl, not sprint. And while restraint can be a virtue, here it flirts too closely with inertia.

Hamilton, best known for her haunting turn in 1984, delivers a performance of quiet intensity. Her portrayal of Harper teeters between vulnerability and steel resolve. Michael Maloney also anchors the film with a weary charisma that keeps certain scenes afloat, particularly when the tension begins to sag. Madhav Sharma, too, brings subtle gravity to his supporting role, though he is underutilised.

Where Ride the Snake does strike a chord is in its atmospheric tension. The visuals are brooding and textured, soaked in bleak palettes and long, oppressive silences. Grewal and his cinematographer seem deeply attuned to visual storytelling—but perhaps too much so. At times, the atmosphere feels like an end in itself rather than a complement to the story. There are echoes of genre classics everywhere, but they never quite congeal into something distinct or urgent. It’s a film that gestures toward menace without ever fully embracing it.

Yet, beneath the uneven pacing and the sometimes self-conscious aesthetic, there’s something commendable. Grewal’s comment about the difficulties of casting British/Asians in non-stereotypical roles speaks to a real and persistent issue in UK cinema. In that regard, Ride the Snake is a step forward—not because it tokenises its characters of colour, but because it simply allows them to exist in complex, human roles. The film’s universality lies in its grief, in its moral murk, and in the desperation that grief can provoke.

The Prognosis:

For all its noble intentions and atmospheric flourishes, Ride the Snake ends up coiling in on itself. It never quite delivers the psychological punch it promises. The suspense simmers but rarely boils. The horror stays at arm’s length, more suggested than felt. In the end, it’s a film that mourns deeply but moves too slowly—and struggles to find its own voice amid the echoes of cinematic ghosts.

  • Movie Review by Saul Muerte

Ride The Snake is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.

The Ugly Stepsister Finds Her Voice in the Shadows

10 Saturday May 2025

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This darkly feminist fairy tale slow-burns its way through vanity, envy, and the societal curse of beauty.

In Emilie Kristine Blichfeldt’s icy, melancholic The Ugly Stepsister, the velvet drapes and soft golden glows of the fairy tale kingdom mask something far more corrosive: the bitter ache of envy, inadequacy, and the impossible pressure to be seen. It’s a film that peers behind the glass slipper and turns the looking glass back on us—audiences raised on ideals of beauty, charm, and happy endings for the fairest of them all.

The titular “ugly” stepsister, Elvira (Lea Myren), is not the cackling caricature of pantomime lore. Played with aching restraint, she’s a quiet storm of desperation and longing—her plainness not exaggerated but perceptibly measured against the luminous perfection of her stepsister, who seems preordained to capture the prince’s attention. The film’s magic lies not in spells or transformations, but in its psychological excavation of a woman unraveling under the weight of expectation and invisibility.

Blichfeldt wisely avoids overt parody or satire. Instead, she leans into the fairy tale structure only to slowly erode it, exposing the emotional and societal cost of a world built on outward beauty. In Elvira’s quiet glances, her tightening posture, and her increasing willingness to bend morality in pursuit of admiration, we witness something tragic: not a villainess in the making, but a reflection of how warped self-worth becomes in a world that equates beauty with value.

The film’s pacing is deliberate, sometimes to a fault. It takes its time—almost too much—in building its portrait of simmering resentment and warped aspiration. But the stillness serves a purpose: The Ugly Stepsister is less concerned with plot propulsion than with emotional erosion. This is no Cinderella story, even if it steals her ballgown. It’s a study in marginalisation—of being the one never chosen, never seen, and never allowed to dream on her own terms.

Though the production design is gorgeously oppressive—regal and cold in equal measure—it’s the thematic spine that resonates: the film’s commentary on the female experience within patriarchal beauty myths. Elvira’s descent isn’t driven by malice, but by an internalised belief that to be loved, she must first be looked at. It’s a bitter irony that in pursuing visibility, she must become someone—something—unrecognisable.

The Prognosis:

The Ugly Stepsister doesn’t always land its punches with perfect clarity and might frustrate viewers expecting a more dramatic reversal or fantasy payoff. Blichfeldt isn’t rewriting a fairy tale—she’s exhuming it, pulling up what’s been buried beneath centuries of curated perfection.

In this world, beauty is not a blessing. It’s a prison. And for those left outside its gates, the fairy tale is a nightmare told in soft pastels and sharpened smiles.

  • Review by Saul Muerte

Ice Cream Man (1995): A Cold Treat That’s Long Since Soured

08 Thursday May 2025

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Chilled to Imperfection: Three decades on, Ice Cream Man remains a sticky splatter of missed opportunities and cult oddities.

By 1995, horror had begun to lean into its self-awareness, but Ice Cream Man, directed by Norman Apstein, wasn’t quite in on the joke—or if it was, it delivered its punchlines with a busted scooper.

Set in a seemingly idyllic suburb where childhood innocence melts into madness, the film stars Clint Howard as Gregory Tudor, a traumatised boy turned deranged adult who inherits an ice cream truck… and uses it to serve up frozen desserts laced with severed fingers, eyeballs, and worse. It’s a premise ripe for absurd horror-comedy gold—but what we get is a lumpy mess of gore, uneven pacing, and tonal whiplash.

There’s a certain offbeat charm to Ice Cream Man, thanks largely to Clint Howard’s twitchy, off-kilter performance. He leans into Gregory’s tragic backstory with a kind of unhinged commitment that almost makes you feel for him—almost. But even Howard’s peculiar screen presence can’t save a film that struggles to balance grotesque horror and campy fun. It often veers too far in either direction and ends up stranded in a sticky, blood-stained middle ground.

The film’s greatest crime isn’t the body parts buried in sundaes—it’s the wasted potential. There’s an entire subplot involving a gang of precocious kids playing junior detectives, seemingly lifted from a Spielbergian playbook, but with none of the polish. Their interactions often feel like a rough draft of The Monster Squad, minus the cohesion or chemistry. And while the kills are creatively grotesque, the direction and editing drain them of impact.

Still, Ice Cream Man has nestled itself in cult corners for its sheer oddity. It’s one of those late-night cable curiosities—the kind of movie you stumble upon half-awake, unsure if it was real or a fever dream. There’s a cheap, backyard-horror spirit to it that some might affectionately admire, especially with its practical effects and lo-fi aesthetic. But admiration doesn’t equal success.

The Prognosis:

Three decades later, Ice Cream Man remains a curious artifact of mid-90s direct-to-video horror—part slasher, part black comedy, part botched parody. It never manages to be scary, funny, or compelling, but there’s something to be said for its persistence. Like freezer-burnt leftovers, it’s still there… but only the brave or nostalgic should dare a second bite.

  • 30th Anniversary Retrospective by Saul Muerte

Creature (1985): A Pale Echo from Saturn’s Shadows

07 Wednesday May 2025

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An icy moon, a forgotten monster, and a film still trapped in the shadow of its predecessors.

By 1985, the cinematic trail left by Alien had already spawned a legion of imitators, each trying to harness the same claustrophobic dread in cold, inhuman spaces. Creature, directed by William Malone, was one of those echoing attempts—big on promise, but undermined by budgetary constraints, pacing issues, and a story that always feels like it’s playing catch-up with better films.

Set on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, the film follows a team of American explorers who stumble upon an ancient alien lifeform… one that’s been resting, quite undisturbed, for about 200,000 years—until now. But instead of unfurling as a fresh nightmare in the vein of Ridley Scott or John Carpenter, Creature quickly shows its hand as an awkward patchwork of sci-fi horror tropes, leaning on atmosphere it can’t fully conjure and characters we barely come to know.

The film does score points for its setting: the barren, icy terrain of Titan is a fitting stage for isolation and cosmic dread. There are moments—fleeting though they may be—where you can feel the weight of that space, the crushing silence, the desperate last gasps of human life under alien pressure. But these moments rarely evolve into anything more than background mood. The tension is never sustained.

Much of Creature’s legacy has survived in cult circles, owing partly to its practical effects and its modest but ambitious creature design, which—when shown sparingly—can deliver a jolt or two. Yet the creature itself, supposedly the film’s main draw, feels underutilised and poorly revealed. The mystery dies the moment we see too much, too soon. It’s less terrifying predator and more sluggish, rubbery reminder of what could have been.

Performances are serviceable, but thinly sketched. Klaus Kinski shows up as a wild card—naturally—but even his brand of manic energy can’t elevate a script that barely holds together under scrutiny. His presence, like the alien, feels like something stitched in for effect rather than organically grown from the narrative.

What Creature most sorely lacks is identity. It wants to be Alien, it wants to be The Thing, and it even wants to nod at Cold War paranoia with its American and German tensions, but never manages to settle into a rhythm of its own. The result is a film that feels more like a VHS relic than a true lost classic—better suited to playing in the background of a late-night sci-fi marathon than being revisited for serious chills.

That said, there’s still a strange charm to it all. The film is a product of its time—ambitious in scope, restricted in execution, and clearly crafted by filmmakers who loved the genre. William Malone would go on to prove himself more confidently in later works like House on Haunted Hill (1999), but here, he was still wading through derivative waters.

The Prognosis:

Forty years on, Creature remains a faint star in the vast constellation of 80s horror sci-fi. Not quite forgotten, not quite worth remembering—it lingers, orbiting obscurity, its promise still sleeping beneath the ice.

  • 40th Anniversary Retrospective by Saul Muerte

Ink, Flesh, and Fire: Teruo Ishii’s Inferno of Torture (1969)

03 Saturday May 2025

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A feverish plunge into Edo-era exploitation, where the beauty of art is carved from the cruelty of flesh.

By the late 1960s, Japanese director Teruo Ishii had cemented his reputation as a provocateur—an auteur of the abnormal whose films constantly tested the limits of good taste. Following the surreal sadism of his Joys of Torture series and the florid transgressions of Orgies of Edo, Ishii would return once more to the nexus of eroticism and agony with Inferno of Torture (徳川いれずみ師：責め地獄). Released in 1969, this film marked yet another swirling descent into the baroque horrors of Japan’s past, tinged with the obsessions of modern exploitation cinema.

Set during the Tokugawa era, Inferno of Torture builds its narrative around the booming trade of tattooed geisha—women whose bodies are transformed into canvases to satisfy the exotic desires of wealthy Europeans. What begins as a lushly costumed tale of artisanship soon mutates into something darker and more sinister. The competition between two rival tattoo masters (each with their own brand of brutality and artistry) spirals into a portrait of obsession, commodification, and systemic cruelty, where the female form becomes both sacred and sacrificial.

Ishii’s camera lingers with equal reverence on the intricacies of traditional Japanese tattooing (irezumi) and the often shocking violence enacted to “preserve” or “perfect” these living artworks. His aesthetic is unmistakable: elaborate production design, garish colour palettes, and sudden, shocking cuts that blur the boundary between the ceremonial and the obscene. Here, torture is not only spectacle—it’s also currency. Beauty is literally etched into pain.

While some of Ishii’s contemporaries were leaning into more psychological or supernatural horror, Inferno of Torture embraced the physical and the performative. The film sits on a precarious edge, asking the audience to reckon with the allure of suffering while never quite condemning its purveyors. It is this ambiguity—this refusal to clearly moralise—that makes the film both fascinating and uncomfortable. Is it an indictment of patriarchal cruelty, or an indulgence in it? Ishii leaves that question open, daring the viewer to look closer.

It’s important to view Inferno of Torture not as an isolated work, but as part of Ishii’s greater obsession with the grotesque pageantry of pain. Like his earlier Shogun’s Joy of Torture (1968), this film pulls from real historical punishments and court practices but filters them through a lens of stylised surrealism. Yet, where Shogun’s Joy was fragmented and episodic, Inferno is more narratively cohesive—anchored by the rivalry of the tattoo artists and the women who bear the consequences of their egos.

As noted in our prior discussion of Ishii’s legacy, the director had a unique ability to cloak exploitation in aesthetics. Inferno of Torture exemplifies this duality. It is a film of contradictions: gorgeous yet grotesque, meditative yet exploitative, artistic yet undeniably sleazy. Ishii revels in this tension, crafting a work that is less about resolution and more about confronting the audience with their own thresholds of taste.

Inferno of Torture remains a vivid example of the extremities that defined the tail-end of the 1960s in Japanese genre cinema. It’s a challenging watch—not merely because of its brutality, but because of its beauty. That beauty, as Ishii reminds us again and again, comes at a price.

  • 1960s retrospective review by Saul Muerte

Until Dawn Falls into the Loop, but Misses the Fear

02 Friday May 2025

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This adaptation of the cult horror game spins a promising premise into a stylish but shallow spiral of déjà vu.

Translating a beloved video game into a feature-length film is no easy feat, and Until Dawn (2025) finds itself caught between reverence and reinvention—never fully satisfying either impulse. Directed by David F. Sandberg (Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation), the film adaptation of Supermassive Games’ acclaimed 2015 interactive horror experience arrives with expectations as high as the snowy mountain peaks that once haunted the original. Unfortunately, the result is a visually competent, sometimes eerie effort that ultimately loops on itself in more ways than its premise intends.

Gone are the sweeping tracking shots of icy cliff edges and gothic ski lodges that defined the game’s snowy isolation. In their place is a mist-shrouded valley and a rusting visitor centre—less operatic in tone, more grounded in survival horror clichés. The story follows Clover (Kaitlyn Bernard) and her group of friends who venture into the remote wilderness where her sister Melanie vanished a year earlier. But this isn’t a straightforward slasher. Soon, each grisly death resets the evening, plunging the characters into a surreal time loop. Every death becomes part of a macabre routine—a concept ripe for tension and innovation.

Yet despite this intriguing setup, Until Dawn struggles to replicate the game’s carefully balanced atmosphere of dread, character interplay, and escalating supernatural unease. While the film toys with repetition in the vein of Happy Death Day or Triangle, its execution feels flatter. The stakes should rise with each iteration, but instead, the sense of urgency dissipates into predictability.

One of the most glaring issues is tonal dissonance. The game deftly shifted between teen horror, creature feature, and psychological thriller—leaning into its interactive nature to let players explore moral ambiguity and consequence. The film, however, strips away much of that complexity. The characters are archetypal and underwritten, with little of the branching narrative depth that gave players a stake in their survival. Despite Bernard’s earnest turn and a committed supporting cast, we don’t get enough time or texture to care deeply when the inevitable deaths arrive—especially when the film keeps undoing them.

David F. Sandberg, known for his knack with shadowplay and minimalist dread, brings some eerie flourishes to the visuals—particularly in the initial sequences of isolation and the early deaths. But his more intimate, character-driven horror style doesn’t always sync with the sprawling, meta-narrative scope the story requires. There are moments of atmosphere, to be sure, but they’re rarely sustained.

Perhaps most disappointing to fans of the game is the near-total omission of the Wendigo mythology that underpinned its final act. In favour of streamlining the plot for a film-length runtime, the supernatural elements are toned down or erased entirely—leaving a more conventional masked killer in their place. It’s a simplification that robs the story of its distinctive edge and sense of mythic terror.

The Prognosis:

Until Dawn isn’t an outright failure—just a missed opportunity. It flirts with high-concept horror and offers a few moments of stylish unease, but never quite captures the pulpy grandeur or narrative inventiveness of its source material. As a standalone film, it’s serviceable. As an adaptation, it’s trapped in its own loop, chasing shadows of something far more chilling.

  • Movie review by Saul Muerte