Before Dawn

Before Dawn is about an estranged couple who go on a vacation to save their troubled relationship, but things goes awry when they find themselves under attack from the walking dead. The first half of this film is literally all mama/papa drama. I kept pulling up the movie on IMDb to make sure it was a horror movie and not a drama. After about 35 minutes of boring relationship drama, we see out first zombie. Once the scene with the zombie is over, it's back to more drama. The last 20 or so minutes of the film start to get a little interesting, but not enough to make up for the hour of boringness! Before Dawn is not really a horror at all, it's a full-blown drama with a couple zombies thrown in for substance. I think if you watched it going in, knowing that it was a drama and not expecting a horror, and then it would probably be pretty good. But since I only watch horror, I found it to be boring. Although the ending was kinda cool and the zombies were the spaz-iest zombies I've ever seen, still not enough to give this movie anything higher than a 4.

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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.

A couple rent a cottage in Yorkshire as an attempt to rekindle their failing marriage. For 45 minutes you are trapped in that cottage with them and nothing happens except for an argument about the great wall of china. This is not character development.

When the zombies turn up they bark and snarl like Yorkshire terriers. To make them look jerky they simply removed some frames from the film. This looks terrible. Highlights of the zombie action include a 10 minute long chase scene around a land rover with hilariously amped up action music as though something exciting is happening.

This is a poor effort with non-existent pace, illogical reactions and mediocre acting. The ending is laughable too.

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.

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.