Review of Just Before Dawn (1981) by Laura T — 03 Mar 2008

I used to stumble back and forth through Best Buy's horror section looking for anything interesting I didn't own (ha! right!) until I gave up, but once in a great while some strange obscure special or collector's edition of a cult flick would suddenly (and rather inexplicably) show up and catch my eye. Once I found this very strange yellow and black cover to a movie that implied it was some strange, strange movie and probably a classic with horror audiences. Despite being rather a horror audience myself, I know there are massive (MASSIVE!) gaps in my knowledge. I got the impression from the bits of fluff that I read (possibly including the back of the DVD) that this was in the vein of (going backward) The Hills Have Eyes and (going forward) Wrong Turn. This is half-accurate, but not completely so. In looking around just prior to viewing the used copy of the two disc version I picked up, I started to see the word "slasher" sliding around. This set off vague warning bells in the back of my mind--"slasher" is not a word with which I equate quality. I'm not opposed to them, but the die-hard slasher fans tend, in my experience, to stick pretty strictly to rather formulaic, generic, simplistic and repetitive kill-based horror with no underlying anything--not even acting, scripting or basic quality necessary.

The film opens on an uncle and a nephew out hunting in the mountains, the two of them in an abandoned church making jokes (of the benign heretical variety) when a strange man appears at the door with a large machete-like knife (with serrations! eeg!) which he promptly makes use of. From here I was thinking--hey, this isn't a slasher, I see no teenag--oh. There we are, an RV (The Hills Have Eyes!) filled with five kids. Apparently they are going camping, and we have two couples and a nerdy fifth wheel with a camera. Oh dear. This doesn't look good. I smell flat characters and generic, predictable tripe. But my hopes are higher than that, at least a teensy bit, because I saw that the score I've been enjoying, a nice, moody deep synthetic score with the occasional strings and single snare drum (are these synthetic too? the drum didn't sound like it) was written by none other than Brad Fiedel, who also scored the original The Terminator (and its sequel), Fright Night, Desert Bloom, The Serpent and the Rainbow--amongst many others. The theme from The Terminator, at the least, is one of my favourites.*.

And yet, here was a surprise. There's George Kennedy (he of Naked Gun, Flight of the Phoenix, and so on) as a Forest Service employee working on a bonsai tree and calming down his horse Agatha. He warns the kids (eek, more clichés, though this was only '81) and asks where they're going, and they actually have reason for where they're going--young Warren (Gregg Henry, who I've seen a thousand times in varying roles, usually as someone sleazy and self-interested, and probably easiest recognized from Payback as my memory goes, but also appearing in Slither) has just inherited this property. He's also ten years trained at mountain climbing, and his girlfriend (Deborah Benson), too, is trained. Of course, the other three, Jonathan (Chris Lemmon) and his girlfriend Megan (Jamie Rose) and brother Daniel (Ralph Seymour) are not trained, but that's not too bad. It turns out the characters are not raving morons, the killer is not a generic evil force, nor a plain killer, finding an easy balance between being thoroughly creepy (intended, Lieberman says, as a "primitive" or "caveman" rather than an inbred psychopath) and acceptably "possible," and Fiedel's score mixed with fantastic visuals of the deep, thickly wooded forests around them (not to be confused with Terence Malick-style lingering nature shots, though I'd sure as hell like to see a Malick-directed slasher...but I don't need to wait five to ten years for it either) give it its own kind of atmosphere.

It plays with stereotypes and expectations, but not in that irritatingly obvious way that says, "Hey! I'm doing something other than what you thought! In fact the exact opposite! Nyah nyah! Isn't that cool?!" It seems more like characters and events play themselves out as they should and as you would expect--in a "real" situation, not the usual slasher one--but not without losing the spice of coincidence inherent to plotting--both fictional and non. This is not, as Lieberman has just said in the interview on the television behind me, designed as a series of murder setpieces (interesting, almost the exact thing that entered my mind as I was watching, that it ISN'T that) but rather as a reference to something more like Deliverance, yet with a more slasher-like sensibility. I'm quite pleased with it, and glad I did pick it up, despite the fact that I can usually take or leave slashers. I'm hesitant to even call it one, yet it obviously is--which I think is a good thing to say about a slasher.

*OK, this really doesn't matter, but I'm now looking at Brad Fiedel and he has Eraserhead hair. How weird. Maybe it's Morrissey hair.