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.

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.

It's amazing how many zombie films there are out there . If nothing else it keeps The Horror Channel in the UK constantly running . I'm trying to remember a time when post apocalypse scenarios didn't feature zombies . When I was a teenager nuclear annihilation seemed the major plot device to set up the end of the world . As soon as Gorby pulled down The Iron Curtain 20 billion zombies staggered out to take over the world

As you can guess the point I'm making is that there's an element of seen it all before and that's probably why Boyle's 28DL was such a big hit - he brought something new to the table by having the living dead outsprint Usain Bolt . One can understand the point BEFORE DAWN is trying for . It's a bit like Ben Wheatley's KILL LIST where British social drama meets unrestrained horror but ends up being a bit seen it all before where the protagonists lock themselves in a farmhouse . If nothing else it's no worse than WORLD WAR Z and cost 150 million dollars less to produce and does contain a deeply cynical line

" What are the police doing ? "

" Oh it's the end of the world let's phone the f---in pigs "

which caused me to stifle a laugh but there's not much of a film here

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.

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.