Before Dawn

Someone urged me to watch this movie because they had seen it at a festiival a few years ago, but I couldn't find it anywhere, luckily a stream into UKs Horror Channel provided through Film On allowed me to see this.

The guy that makes the movie is the same guy who made a Bait which I really enjoyed, but this is a whole different ballgame. For some unknown reason the cast were not recorded (sound) at the time of shooting, yes they say the lines but clearly no sound guy was tasked with recording actual audio. Therefore all that is done post filming, I believe they call it adr. This was awful there is no background sounds, everything deathly quiet. Worse still the performances because of the soap opera style approach to horror feel removed. Don't get me wrong performances are good, the film is quite good because it's a thinking zombie movie, it's different. But this whole sound issue, it does not allow you to fully engage in the film. You just simply don't feel that level of attachment. Because I could not get into the zone, the film simply does not work for me on any level.

There is some meat to the domestic drama of this film. When the zombie part starts, the shifts pulls for emotions in an interesting fashion. That being said, the film then follows ideas that have been done previously. Well acted with some decent directing, I enjoyed this experience.

This wasn't really that much of a zombie film until the ending. But taken as a whole it reminded me a lot of Black Summer the series which I really like, it just the last few minutes. That surge at the end saves it from a 2 rating and raises it to a 4/10.

I had the good fortune to see this picture at Frightfest 13. The film opens with beautiful shots of the British countryside, immediately making you think "how can anything bad happen here".

But being a movie with the living dead you already know the answer.

This is an intimate film as you follow this couple on there last ditch attempt to save their marriage. Indeed the film could have played out as the final death throes of a relationship without the invasion of zombies and indeed Dominic Brunt's desperation to resuscitate what has died is palpable.Joanne Mitchell as Meg is superb and makes a potentially unsympathetic character someone you care about.The acting is measured non-histrionic and understated.Everything is very real.

The message of the film could very much be "there are greater horrors in life than zombies".

Although they are flesh eating zombies in the film this could easily be enjoyed as a companion piece to "28 Days Later".

The waves of horror that wash over you and the emotional ride Dominic Brunt goes through are brilliant.

A cracking script, a strong cast,, and excellent camera work allow you to over look the perhaps not perfect make-up or the overdubbing, but this is to be too critical of a film that succeeds to strike a different note in the genre and bring a solid sense of reality and horror to what is happening whether it's the zombies or the death of a marriage.

Recommended.

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.