Review by Adam Stephen Kelly
Stars Renee Willner, Bridget Neval, Dawn Klingberg,
Danny Alder, Taryn Eva, Mark Allan Taylor, Nina
Nicols, Peter Stratford, Trent Schwarz
Written by Brett Anstey
Certification Not Rated
Runtime 81 minutes
Directed by Brett Anstey
For some reason hailed as Australia's answer to a fourth Evil Dead, Damned by Dawn is a low-budget supernatural horror that has the kind of foundations that are temporarily strong, but soon crumble. Starting off in an interesting way, the direction of the film swiftly collapses and you wind up not actually really knowing what the movie is trying to be.
When a young woman and her boyfriend visit her parents' house for a short stay, all hell pretty much breaks loose when her grandmother passes away in the night. The old woman prepared her granddaughter for the inevitable by giving her an urn so that she could be cremated upon her death, as if she isn't, a banshee will rise and unleash terror upon them thanks to a family curse.
And what happens? Yes indeed, the banshee and her army of ghosts and ghouls rise from the grave, some wielding scythes, all looking incredibly unbelievable in woeful CGI. But it's not so much as cheap and nasty looking as it is just badly designed. Surprisingly, for the budget, the digital work is actually fairly decent, but when you're trying to play a straight horror with plenty of blood and scares, the last thing you need is a floating skeleton that looks like it belongs in a Halloween special of a cartoon for kids.
One of the film's many other flaws is in the grandmother's death. The banshee actually makes herself known whilst the woman is sleeping, and she's awoken by its horrible shrieking from the neighbouring woods. It is only then that she actually slips away, so I am bemused by this rather large plot hole. And how are you supposed to ensure her cremation when the curse spits out its evil before she's even gone?
Speaking of scares, when the banshee first appears, a few minutes before she brings her undead friends to the party, the tension is genuinely built well and there is a creepy atmosphere about this isolated house by the woods. Now if only this aura of an actually effective horror film could have been smartly sustained rather than poured down the drain. Evil Dead 4 it is most certainly not, and the only similarity that I can put between that franchise and Damned by Dawn is that the title is most likely an homage to The Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn.