Johnson) birthday, so his pals and their partners are celebrating as best they can. An opening montage projects a worst-case-scenario spiraling from Trump’s initial pandemic negligence to multiple new COVID strains, curfews and societal chaos, with more than 30 million Americans dead from the virus by mid-2022. Here the annoying BFFs are duly stuck at home - or rather, in homes scattered across the country. The director’s last two features (2017’s “Escape Room” - the first of a half dozen features to date with that title - then last year’s “No Escape”) were both about annoying millennial characters trapped in recreational “games” that turned out to be deadly serious in a vaguely “Saw”-like way.

Vertical Entertainment is releasing to available U.S./Canadian theaters, VOD and digital on Feb. But not every story is suited for Zoom-style presentation, and this derivative, uninspired one only underlines the strain in being fit to a presentational framework that does neither actors nor audience any favors. You have to admire filmmakers finding ways to keep plugging away within pandemic restrictions.

Will Wernick’s film not only fails to use that format in clever or suspenseful ways, it blows the basics of maintaining plausibility and viewer interest. Unfortunately, we’re likely to get a lot more in the mode of “ Safer at Home,” which likewise hinges on friends video-conferencing during shutdown. It was, however, bound to be the exception which proved a preexisting rule: that found-footage thrillers remain a tapped-out genre, no matter if one in every 20 or so manages to squeeze some new life from the form. One of the sleeper hits of the shutdown last year was Rob Savage’s British horror “Host,” a very short (just under an hour) and sweetly scary tale of friends whose weekly Zoom call during COVID quarantine gets crashed by an unwelcome supernatural visitor.

Horror movie about zoom call