After a long period of woeful film adaptations of video games, many of which were at the hand of German director Uwe Boll, the genre has seen a surprising upturn of late, especially with the success of such films as The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Minecraft Movie.

This then is based on the 2015 survival horror game of the same name, which sees five friends having to survive the night in the woods.

Having had a sister go missing some time ago, Clover (Ella Rubin) decides to try and find her, with the help of four of her friends.

They drive to where she was last seen, a gas station near a mining town called Glore Valley. The attendant there tells them that they get a lot of people passing through, looking for people, and they all end up in the town, so that’s where they head to.

They hit some extreme weather, which leads them to the visitor center, where they find shelter. But that’s all they find, as it appears to be abandoned. They do find a board with lots of missing photos pinned to it, including one of Clover’s sister, so they appear to be on the right track.

What they don’t know however is that the center is about to get a whole lot of unwelcome visitors, which have one thing on their mind – to kill them all. They succeed too, only for the group to come back to life again, stuck in a time loop, which they somehow have to break out of in order to survive.

Although the 2015 game was fairly well received, it’s hardly a gaming classic. And the fact this film just borrows the world with its own standalone story is a strong indication that there really wasn’t much there for a film. But sadly there’s not much here either.

This is the fourth full-length feature from Swedish director David F. Sandberg (having helmed 2017’s Annabelle: Creation and the two Shazam! Films) and it’s disappointingly generic.

It’s a Frankenstein of a project, made up of various elements from other films, that ultimately sees a bunch of friends trapped in a wooded locale, fighting for their lives. It would have probably worked far better as a parody, such is its generic make-up, but it really struggles playing it for frights.

It’s certainly not helped by very basic foes, which have no real identity of their own, coming across as almost NPC enemies in a video game.

At times it manages to be fairly gory, but with a weak, seen-it-all-before narrative, and worryingly forgettable protagonists, there’s no escaping its true worth, that of an unnecessary adaptation of a pretty average video game.