The Darkest Dawn

Genuinely one of the worst films I have ever seen. No logic, awful script, terrible acting, horrible direction.

Normally I'm down for a B movie sci-fi but this film has no redeeming factors. Just awful. 1/10 because I can't vote zero.

This movie popped in my feed suddenly, with an intriguing description buried in the Thrillers section. For some reason it was either not listed or hidden in the Sci-Fi section, where on top I found a film called "Hungerford" with the tag "Teen Screams" that completely turned me off.

this film had an intriguing enough storyline and setup, and the main character Chloe was actually fun to watch and listen to. The film didn't bother with much in the way of build-up, as we're very quickly thrown into the main plot of "alien invasion" and we start with an almost red herring-esque tease of Chloe and her sister Sam shacking up in a tunnel with a very erratic and traumatized man who is prone to fits of rage and anger, but for whom Chloe and Sam depend upon for food and water.

The only other comparison to this type of setup I could think of was "10 Cloverfield Lane" but we are almost as quickly dissuaded from this by the arrival of a gang of snappy young men, including one named Cowen who behaves with such unusual and ill-timed élan that it was not even remotely shocking for me to discover the actor playing him also wrote and directed the film. The focus of the film is not on him long enough to make him out as a Mary Sue, but while he wasn't an unlikeable character, he was definitely among the least interesting of the group, while having significantly more camera time than the other least interesting character, Kipper.

Once this group gets together, the film starts to go through tropes and clichés without mercy, including the blatantly obvious "kid calling for help turns out to be an ambush" and the "lost group of soldiers with a woke commander who turn out to be bastards" that was more than just a little eerily reminiscent of the middle-end section of 28 Days Later.

Throughout it all, Chloe films everything and occasionally turns the camera on herself to narrate the events to her mother, who went out to work on the morning of the alien invasion and presumably is not coming back. These interludes don't have the same vim and vigor of the prologue camera monologues, which leads to an odd sort of attempt to contrast it that only makes it a bit weird.

Chloe was very happy, charismatic, and upbeat in the camera scenes before the big plot event happens, and, recognizing that a post-apocalyptic survival experience would be deeply traumatic and depressing to witness from the point of view of a 16 year old girl breaking down in front of us on camera, they decide that Chloe goes through these camera interludes with upbeat optimism much of the time.

Except that, for whatever reason, they don't seem to consider the events that unfold with regards to her tone. It's very understandable that she should be in good spirits for the first few camera monologues, but she also maintains that tone of cautious optimism even immediately after stabbing someone to death. It feels like something that was badly edited or else ill-conceived.

As a whole, the film was rather average and not very memorable, aside from Chloe. Apart from that, what makes this film more memorable to me is that, going back to the Sci-Fi section on Netflix, I saw "Hungerford" again, and realized that was a name used in this film repeatedly. Then I re-read the description and saw the name "Cowen" in it. Then I realized this movie is a "sequel" to "Hungerford" and without Chloe, I cannot imagine suffering through a movie led and narrated by Cowen. As I say that, I start watching the movie anyway.

Found footage ... and a sequel too. And yet, if you did like the first one, you should like this too. It's actually slightly better. Though the effects are still very visible and I guess some would say bad (I guess budget wise there was nothing more they could get out of it).

This time around we get new characters and a dad that can't act if his life depended on it - or someone else's life for that matter. Anyway, that on the nose "acting" is bad, but let's say you don't have to endure a lot of it, because "drama" (as in Family Drama) is thankfully short, before we get to the meat of things ... the horror, action and science fiction of it

I must admit, I'm a sucker for most found footage films. So whenever I come across one I've not seen (or even heard of) before, I have to give it a try.

Almost immediately I wanted to give up. The acting isn't great, but that's expected from these low budget films. My issue was how quickly everyone gives up. The mum goes to work and before it even gets dark, the rest of the family are sobbing for her and the main character is saying her goodbyes to her on the camera. Also, on the second day, the government announcement says that the world would surrender right now if they knew how.

The CGI is pretty good to be fair, other than the plane crash scene ... the perspective was horribly wrong. The plane crashed on the road a few meters from the camera.

Ashens was definitely unexpected. I've watched him for years on Youtube, so seeing him in a film other than The Proxy or the Gamechild was a nice surprise.

I tried to finish it, I really did, but I couldn't. It's not even a full length film and although there were fast action shots every 30 seconds, it felt agonisingly slow.

Absolutely some of the worst acting ever. It's just too distracting from what could have been a somewhat enjoyable movie. The dialog is simple-minded and completely unrealistic, bordline art school cheesiness.