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.

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

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.

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.