Horror homage Until Dawn is dead tired, Above The Dust a terrific yet tragic tale

UNTIL DAWN (M18) 103 minutes, opens on April 24The story: Clover (Ella Rubin) and her friends (Michael Cimino, Ji-young Yoo, Belmont Cameli and Odessa A'zion) arrive at a remote mountain valley town to search for her sister (Maia Mitchell), who went missing a year earlier. They become trapped in the abandoned visitor centre, attacked by supernatural entities.

- Whang Yee Ling

Gamer alert: The return of Swedish actor Peter Stormare as therapist Dr Hill is misleading. Until Dawn is a Hollywood adaptation of PlayStation's popular interactive video game mostly in name. It introduces a new ensemble of photogenic teens, and has the five of them murdered and revived to be killed again and again.

They have to somehow survive until dawn, lest they die for real.

Were this an inventive spin on the mortal time loop such as the combat science-fiction Edge Of Tomorrow (2014) or college whodunit Happy Death Day (2017), or even the original choose-your-own-adventure game, the characters would remake their choices to influence their future.

But logic will not help them when there is none in a story that resets, such that they wake up each fatal night in a different horror movie to a masked psycho slasher out of Halloween (1978), torture porn inspired by Saw (2004), monsters, demonic possession and environmental apocalypse.