Damned by Dawn Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		2.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		2.0

Damned by Dawn Blu-ray Movie Review

Damned if you do, damned if…well, just damned if you do.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater November 22, 2010

Ah, low budget horror, how hit or mostly miss you are. For every Night of the Living Dead, Dead Alive, and The Evil Dead—I sense a theme here—there are a hundred straight-to-video wannabes, like Damned by Dawn, which cops liberally from its betters and will inevitably be consigned to the bargain bins and dusty shelves of horror history. Sadly, not every director with a few bucks and an HD video camera can summon the creative resourcefulness and inventive vision of Romero, Jackson, or Raimi. Brett Anstey, the Australian writer/director of Damned by Dawn, tries—he really does—and admittedly, he squeezes a lot of production value out of a clearly limited budget, but unfortunately, he comes up short in the ideas department, with lackluster direction, a tired story, and a dearth of real scares.

The damned will rise...and yell...a lot.

At the start of Damned by Dawn, Claire (Renee Wilner) is returning to her childhood home in the Aussie boondocks to introduce her redneck farmer-type dad (Peter Stratford) and ailing, at-death’s-door grandma (Dawn Klingberg) to Paul (Danny Alder), her new boyfriend. In the car, Paul makes a hardy har har joke about “surviving the weekend,” so we know—if we didn’t already, going into a film called Damned by Dawn—that some serious scheisse is about to go down. And, without much further ado, it does. See, grandma explains that the “Lady of Sorrows, the Weeping One” is coming soon to oversee her journey into the netherworld and—whatever you do!—Claire “mustn’t harm her or interfere.” She’s talking, of course, about a banshee, the ghastly, death-summoning wailers of Irish lore, and no, I have no idea what a Gaelic ghost is doing in Australia. Anyway, the banshee comes a’knockin’ and a’wailin’ that night during a power-outage-inducing thunderstorm, and Claire —forgetting granny’s advice—does interfere, pushing the screaming she-bitch off a balcony and impaling her on a spiked fence. Oops. What grandma didn’t explain is the retribution that the banshee, when interfered with, will summarily unleash. Ready for it? Take a deep breath:

Flying, scythe-wielding CGI skeletons.

Yes, when all hell literally breaks loose, it takes the rather innocuous form of those fixtures of high school science classes the world over—gangly- limbed, slack-jawed skeletons. Granted, these skeletons can fly and look seriously pissed off, but they’re not scary in the slightest. It certainly doesn’t help that the CGI looks like something out of a videogame cut-scene circa 1999, but this is by far the least of the movie’s problems, as not even good special effects can save a bad film. Damned By Dawn is simply dull. The thinly drawn characters run to and fro through the forest, barricade themselves in the rundown farmhouse, and go spelunking in a cockroach-filled cave, but at no point do we give one whit about them or feel any anxiety—let alone panic—about what may happen next. With heel-dragging pacing, characters that exist solely to get picked off, and no scares to speak of, the film has all the tension of a sagging clothesline. Compare the non-stop panic and dread of The Evil Dead, the film from which Damned by Dawn most subtly steals. Did I say subtly? I meant blatently. Anstey cribs from Sam Raimi’s off-kilter camera angles and P.O.V. spirit rushing through the woods cinematography. He slathers his exteriors in a computer-generated haze that pretends to be fog. The film even has its own equivalent of the Book of the Dead and—I kid you not—you’ll hear reverb-heavy disembodied voices chanting, “Join us. Joooiiin uuuuussss.” It goes beyond homage and into the realm of plagiarism.

And yet, Damned By Dawn stops short of pilfering the one element of The Evil Dead it most desperately needs: Sam Raimi’s black- as-death sense of comedy. Damned By Dawn takes itself way too damned seriously. It wants to be a creepy, Hammer Horror-esque, Gothic- with-a-capital-G chiller, all brambles and moors, stone fences and moldering estates, but it lacks the narrative polish—hell, the general polish—to pull it off. Tellingly, we learn in the special features that the film was originally envisioned as a 19th century period piece, but budgetary constraints forced the production to modernize.

I’ll say this: As far as I can recall, I’ve never seen a banshee in a horror film, so Anstey gets a few points for a novel premise. The thing is, this is a premise that’s just waiting to be done better. A banshee, in the right directorial hands, could be terrifying, the true stuff of repeat nightmares. But here, she isn’t so much scary as she is irritating. Her wail—a high-pitched, undulating screech—is by far the most gratingly obnoxious sound effect I’ve heard in a film all year. My cat left the room, obviously freaked out, but it didn’t do much for me. Every time the banshee appeared on screen, her eyes red and bleeding—and seriously, why are these ghosts’ eyes always bleeding?—I picked up my remote, preparing to turn down the volume on my audio receiver a few notches. When a horror film annoys you more than it terrifies you, clearly it’s doing something—or, in this case, a whole host of things—wrong. The acting is flat. The story, which involves a family curse, makes no impact whatsoever. Even the few gore effects will elicit little more than an unimpressed meh. Anstey and his merry band of filmmakers—and they are a merry band, just check out the “making of” documentary—definitely do what they can with their limited resources, but sometimes trying isn’t nearly enough.

Damned by Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Image Entertainment brings Damned By Dawn to Blu-ray with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that's probably fairly true to source but still, it should be said, looks undeniably blah. The film was shot on low-rent high definition video—that is, not the latest, greatest, most expensive gear —and was put through a post-production ringer to desaturated the color in an attempt to make the Aussie sunshine look gray and moody. The result is a picture that's both dull and overprocessed. Vibrant color, of any variety, is intentionally non-existent, and even the gray/blue cast that cloaks the entire film looks wilted. Clarity is okay, especially in close-ups, where a modicum of fine texture is visible in the actors' faces, but detail is often lost in severely crushed black levels. Basically, the picture is dingy and murky. Noise is surprisingly not in excess—although, it looks like some of it has been wiped away in post—but you will notice some compression quirks, including noticeable banding in the CGI fog and various other gradients of gray, and occasional aliasing.

Damned by Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

You can usually count on horror films to deliver bump-in-the-night aural thrills, but Damned by Dawn's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track is wimpier—and less engaging—than most. (Not that this is entirely unexpected, given the film's lower-than-low budget.) You'll hear demons rushing through the rears, some rippling thunder in the space around your head, crumbling rocks tumbling through the surrounds, and—let's not forget—the banshee's obnoxiously bloodcurdling cry piercing through every speaker, but the 5.1 channel mix is largely front-heavy and nearly as involving as it could be. A worse offense, though, is that the track has so many sudden jolts in volume, which will keep you reaching for your remote every few minutes to balance things out. There's also a slightly muffled quality to the actors' voices that doesn't exactly hinder your ability to make out the dialogue, but does sound thick and kind of cruddy. Overall, this is probably the best sound mix the film could conjure up, and while it's not terrible, it could definitely be better.

Damned by Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Commentaries
There are two tracks offered here, a crew commentary with director Brett Anstey, producer Luke Gibson, Editor Dave Redman, production designer David Jackson, and "fog wrangler" Darren Maxwell, along with a cast commentary with Anstey, Renee Willner, Dawn Klingberg, Bridget Neval, Peter Stratford, and Taryn Eva. The first is largely redundant if you've watched already watched the "Making the Damned Film" documentary, but the second, a loose, laugh-filled track, is more entertaining.

Making the Damned Film (SD, 55:32)
Arguably better than the film itself is this lengthy "making of" production documentary, which chronicles Damned By Dawn from start to finish. You may not enjoy the final product, but it's hard to go unimpressed by the sheer enthusiasm and gumption on display here. It's clear that Anstey and his filmmaking buddies simply enjoy getting out and having fun making movies.

Trailer (SD, 1:33)

Damned by Dawn Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Damned by Dawn is an admirable attempt at making a special effects-filled Gothic horror film with very little money, but ultimately it just doesn't come together. For one, it isn't scary at all. Unless, that is, you're existentially terrified by a combination of skeletons and no-budget CGI. A blurb on the cover invites you to "check out Damned by Dawn" if you're "sick of waiting for Evil Dead 4," but I'd advise you to steer clear, pick up The Evil Dead on Blu-ray instead, and if you've already done that, save your money for a rainy day.