Before Dawn

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.

Some five years ago many of my horror friends were quite enthusiastic about an experimental zombie movie named "Zombie Honeymoon", whereas I remained rather unimpressed. Surely the idea of blending zombie-horror with romantic comedy aspects was inventive and courageous, but I felt the result was too awkward and ineffective. What we have here with "Before Dawn" is pretty much the same idea, except that the romantic comedy gets replaced with melodramatic soap opera guff, since the two protagonists are a married couple in the process of separating. Mentally tormented Alex and Meg head out to the British countryside in a final attempt to resolve their marital issues and get reconnected. Things aren't looking too positive, especially for the husband Alex, but then Meg gets attacked and bitten by a zombie when she goes out running. As she's slowly but surely turning into a zombie, Alex still attempts to save his marriage and even find a remedy for his undying wife… There's no real audience for a movie like "Before Dawn". Fans of bloodthirsty horror films are likely to find it tedious and overly dramatic (and rightly so), whereas admirers of more sophisticated cinema will stumble over the many plot holes and loose ends in the story. Where exactly do Alex and Meg's marriage issues originate from? Are they just bored with each other or was there some adultery/betrayal? Besides, at several occasions before the zombie attack, it's clear to see that their marriage is beyond saving. The zombie invasion part of the plot remains vague and unelaborated throughout the entire movie. We never properly find out what caused the dead to rise again and the menace of a narrowing apocalypse is never really sensible. I realize that the events supposedly take place in a remote and isolated area, but three zombies throughout the entire film is hardly worth referring to as an invasion or even an epidemic. The story remains focused on our married couple, even though their story becomes (even) less interesting when she slowly starts decomposing. "Before Dawn" benefices mostly from the idyllic and peaceful Yorkshire filming locations, so it would have been very cool to see these being overrun with rotting corpses, kind of like certain memorable sequences in "28 Weeks Later". Speaking of corpses, the make-up effects are barely mediocre and director Brunt makes the same dreadful mistake of making them fast and furious. The two lead actors, Dominic Brunt and Joanne Mitchell, who also wrote and directed "Before Dawn" together, are married in real life as well, so I certainly hope for them the movie wasn't autobiographic.

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.

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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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.