Until Dawn

 The bigger distributors/production companies don't normally have a distinct "personality" like smaller boutique enterprises do (think A24, Blumhouse, Annapurna), but Sony pictures and most of its component studios have carved out a reputation for themselves over the last couple of decades as "those fucks that seriously need a quality assurance department".

 On a completely unrelated note... here's Until Dawn, a proud Sony Pictures production. Some mild story spoilers ahead.

 Five hot young people go on a trek to the boonies, retracing the steps of the sister of one of their number  who went missing some time prior. On the way they run into a gas attendant who tells them of a nearby valley where people disappear. This would be your typical foreshadowing, except that the attendant is played by Peter Stormare in full-on weirdo mode (and having a lot of fun channeling Nicholas Cage, it seems.) So you know he's going to pop up later, Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style.

 When the gang arrives at the visitor center for the valley (a quaint, colonial-style house), it's abandoned - but even weirder, they find that the house sits at the eye of the storm in a well-delineated circle where the torrential rain outside the area abruptly stops. The group's resident douchebag says that it's a well-known weird weather phenomena: "A waterwall, they wrote that song about it." That's a simultaneously underwritten and overwritten bad joke, and a good showcase for the film' bone-headed, mildly amusing sense of humour.

 The crew (Ella Rubin, Michael Cimino, Odessa A'zion, Ji-young Yoo, and Belmont Cameliis) are mostly interchangeable - the movie is busy enough that they get precious little time to establish character. Rubin is Clover, the closest thing to a main character, and her main trait is that she's in mourning. Young Yoo is a psychic, Cameliis plays the group douchebag, and... that's it - I was disappointed A'zion, who's very talented and likeable, didn't really get anything interesting to do beyond being the mildly sassy one.
 In any case, night falls while they poke around the visitor center, an antique hourglass machinery starts a countdown... and everyone gets stalked and killed by a masked slasher. Then the sand runs out, the machinery resets, everyone freaks out until they're all killed again, this time by a more supernatural, possessing force. Then, when they come to life afterwards, everyone explodes from drinking the water. Yes, spontaneous explosions due to water consumption. It's just as stupid as it sounds and worse still/better yet, it's brought back at a critical junction for an encore.

 Until Dawn is a time loop movie, in other words, in the spirit of Groundhog Day horror reimagining Happy Death Day. The idea is that to make it out, our heroes need to outlast the hourglass and survive the night... but, as the evil mastermind behind everything helpfully explains, "someone always has to die".

 The script (by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler) quickly ties itself into knots trying to keep the overtly busy plot chugging along while shoddily establishing some themes, a backstory and some mythology. I'd characterize it as "almost charmingly incompetent", but I imagine there's some serious studio meddling behind all these poor decisions.
 The horror is overtly reliant on jump scares and, while there are some interesting concepts thrown in (bodies decaying death after death, the very video-gamey choice characters make to kill each other off to 'reset' the timelines, or lost loops discovered via found footage*), none of them are allotted enough time to develop.
 And that's before you take into account weird-ass decisions like a small scene with a Poltergeist-like clown toy that doesn't go anywhere, or the way the timeline abruptly skips over events that seem way more interesting than what we end up getting. It's very poorly crafted.

 At least there's enough weirdness, enough going on that the film is never boring, at least until plot necessities contort it into a far more predictable series of confrontations in the third act.

 The premise and structure of the story allow for it to encompass multiple horror subgenres, like a far dumber, much less successful Cabin in the Woods. For a while, that keeps things interesting; But unfortunately - and unsurprisingly - the script mostly wastes that potential. All the interesting monsters are kept in the margins, and the (by far) most common threat here is a bog standard fast zombie.
 David F. Sandberg's direction is competent but unmemorable - between him and cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (Alexandre Aja's go-to guy) they manage some creepy atmosphere, but that's about it. A by-the-numbers modern horror look.

 The gore seems to be a mix of practical and CGI - it's not done well enough to give it actual heft and most of the scenes are slightly clipped so that they don't get too over-the-top, but it's not bad. The kills are varied and mostly not very imaginative; The best one's a very cruel, drawn-out death by minor explosions that seems out of place (on paper it's there to deflate the movie's most ridiculous scene), but it's still welcome.

 Make-up effects and monsters fare a little better, but they really are just variations on ghouls/zombies, and the movie commits a cardinal scene by foreshadowing a werewolf and then not delivering; I'm pretty sure it's in the bible (thou shalt not blue-ball people by lycanthrope).

The acting is fine - all everyone had to do is basically look pretty and sell their suffering, which they do well enough.

 This all comes from a video game I haven't played (it was until very recently a console exclusive). The game was basically an attempt to make an interactive movie, so it's a little surprising to read there's very little in common with the source material - though I have played other games by the same company, and going from that I seriously doubt a faithful adaptation would have been that much better. 

 Until Dawn: The Motion Picture tries instead to adapt the interactive element - the experimentation, exploration and different deaths that come via the time loop mechanic, which sounds pretty admirable to me... maybe the only thing I actually find worthy of respect here.

*: A plot point, and scene, that echoes similar ones in the reviled Blair Witch sequel, no less. This movie fails to redeem it, though it remains a good idea and one worth stealing.