Before Dawn

BEFORE DAWN is a low budget, low rent zombie movie, made and filmed in Yorkshire by husband and wife team Dominic Brunt and Joanne Mitchell. Brunt is best known to viewers of UK TV as the lovable Paddy in the long-running soap EMMERDALE, so watching him battle vicious zombies in this film (which he also wrote and directed) is something of a novelty.

Unfortunately the novelty value is just about all this has going for it, because boy, BEFORE DAWN is bad. I actually didn't mind the ultra slow, family drama of the first half, purely because the horror comes subtle and there's a growing sense of unease which works really well. Some nice location photography really adds to the experience and I was left with high hopes for the rest of the production.

Sadly the zombie denouement is less than impressive and something you'd expect to see in the likes of shot-on-video trash like ZOMBIE CHRONICLES. Brunt unwisely employs some extreme (and ludicrous) shaky-cam effects for the zombie attack sequences, which are overblown and ridiculous. There's no zombie horde here, no shambling menace, just a story that peters out leading to an anticlimax that makes you think "that's it?". I like Brunt but a dearth of originality makes BEFORE DAWN one of the worst zombie movies out there.