Review of Damned by Dawn (2009) by Aleksandar J — 29 Dec 2010

A mediocre Aussie low-budget horror flick that takes a crack at the legend of the banshee but quickly flies off into territory that's both unrelated to the legend and hackneyed. A woman goes to visit her dying grandmother who warns her not to interfere when "the lady of sorrows" shows up to take her away. The woman interferes, of course, and unleashes the wrath of the banshee of the O'Neils. Much screaming, flying CG skeletons that splatter into muck on the windshield of a moving car, and cockroach infestation ensues.

There are a couple of good scares to be had, but much of what's here is unintentionally humorous and internally inconsistent. The banshee's scream is capable of waking the dead, but the dead take the form of flying skeletons portrayed by low-end CG that leaves them looking fake and a bit silly. That they are almost always material but sometimes ghostly as convenient may leave a few viewers scratching their heads. So may the fact that sometimes shotguns are effective against them and sometimes they aren't. The banshee herself bleeds when wounded despite being described as a spirit. She's portrayed by a snub-nosed actress painted white with fake blood around her eyes and is never overly scary; she mainly screams and glares at people. Wrathful undead grandma is a bit nightmarish but delivers some silly lines in her big scene. And then there's the undead, disemboweled boyfriend who oozes cockroaches, the connection of which to the rest of the story is never remotely explained. His makeup is worse than most Halloween costumes and why he comes back from the dead when none of the other victims do so is never made clear. It's as if writer/director Brett Anstey threw together everything he remembered from a bunch of random horror movies in his screenplay.

None of these shortcomings manage to overshadow the tired acting of lead actress Renee Willner, though. The funniest scene in the flick comes when she's being strangled by her undead boyfriend; her face contorts into a series of funny faces that resemble something out of a Warner Brothers cartoon. That scene alone is worth the price of admission. It's probably a testament to the lack of a budget that there wasn't a better take shot for this scene.

The banshee is a rarely-explored possibility for horror films. I'm always hopeful when a new banshee-based flick comes along that it will be a good one. "Damned by Dawn" isn't that film, though. It combines elements from a long list of horror films ranging from "Army of Darkness" to "The Ring" to "Night of the Living Dead," but it never ventures onto original ground and it never develops the banshee herself. Silly, forgettable, disappointing stuff that will soon fade into deserved obscurity.