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Damned By Dawn

Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2010 8:24 pm
by jonbly
Goodness, a scary movie! At Frightfest? Whatever next...

Showed its budget at times and the lead character was pretty stupid throughout, but effectively used sneaky boo tactics to scare jonbly out of his (tiny) mind.

Not quite clear on why the banshee was restored at the end - best solution jonbly can come up with is that the lead miscarried, leaving her the last of her line, and when the banshee licked her blood it thus completed the prophecy.

7/10

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 1:29 am
by LeeManc
I couldn't get into this at all, the hardest thing for me to understand is why the lighting was so bad. One minute there was something happening outside and it was darkish and smoky, the next we were inside and there was sunlight coming through the windows then outside and it was darker than earlier, then it would get a bit lighter then go really dark again! Worst Australian film I have watched this weekend.

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:26 am
by Pukka
Everytime the banshee screamed, she woke me up! I did actually drift off in a few places (very tired - and it doesn't help when you have people in front of you getting all snug n comfy :) ) The film was better than I thought, I'll give it anothergo on dvd.

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Mon Aug 30, 2010 11:48 pm
by Grindhouse
it needed humour and it was all more poorer for its lack of it,giving it an evil dead 4 tag was too kind,it was more like the frighteners but without the humour and thats not Peter Jacksons best but this film really needed something and a wailing banshee was only annoying and not scary,nice fx though but it just didnt do it for me.

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 12:06 am
by djwoody
What a waste of time. Poor acting, no budget, no scares!! Surely there must have been better alternatives!

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 9:58 am
by Eddie Krueger
I'm usually reticent to be too harsh on a film, but this was terrible. I'm glad others enjoyed it but I really thought it was rubbish. I could forgive the bad acting, the amount of irrelevant padding in the script and the horrible lead female character that i wished death on in every scene - but what I really can't get past is the idea that CGI ghosts could ever be scary!

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 10:28 am
by AdeBrown
I thought this would be improved if they'd jettisoned the CGI ghosts and kept the banshee. She was in the mould of Sadako and the spooky Grudge ghosts, but once the animations kicked in, it was a sub Frighteners yawn.
Perhaps if they'd built up more tension about the family history part of the story...

Hint for grand-daughters: when your grandma smiles peacefully when telling you about the wailing woman that will bring her safely to her ancestors, maybe you should take that into account when a wailing woman appears?

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 10:54 am
by Eddie Krueger
I agree Ade, the Banshee grandmother was great - more physical effects like that would have helped this film.

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 3:26 pm
by GeorgeCaplin
The first half an hour or so I was really enjoying the film. The banshee was freaky and it looked the markings of being a good scary film. Then a computer generated flying skeleton appeared and too much of the banshee was shown and the impending dread and fear was gone. The zombie boyfriend bit was poor. I think the film hit a stumbling block of taking itself a little too seriously. In the end the scariest thing in the woods was granny!

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 3:32 pm
by halloweengirl
djwoody wrote:What a waste of time. Poor acting, no budget, no scares!! Surely there must have been better alternatives!
Thank you! This was terrible. Did anyone else think the Banshee was the love child of Ozzy Osbourne and Toyah?

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 3:49 pm
by The Soapmaker
I was really enjoying the first half. Dubbing it "Evil Dead 4" was silly, but it did genuinely capture some of that atmosphere (minus the humour). Unfortunately it got so far, then it seemed to just go round in circles and slowly die.

Paul mentioned in the intro that they'd added some new effects, presumably that was the CGI which didn't work at all. The puppets-on-strings ghosts were a lot more effective. Modern technology isn't always best!

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:08 pm
by Wolfshade
Calling it Evil Dead 4 is just insulting to Evil Dead, Damned By Dawn was totally naff and never in a millions years should it be dubbed Evil Dead 4!

It totally failed as a horror comedy, it simply wasn't scary and wasn't funny, there were obvious attempts as 'jump scares' that never even came close to making you jump, and the ghosts were the naffest things ever - in particular that skeleton that looked like it had just walked on to the film from a childrens ghost train fairground ride! Damned By Dawn runs it close with The Tortured and Dead Cert as the worst film of the weekend.

also this film was far too loud, I was wearing ear plugs for every film of the fest, but even with ear plugs in, I was still almost deafened during the "AAARARARARARARARARARARARARARARARARA" moments, god knows what it was like for people without ear plugs in.

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 4:25 pm
by The Aylmer
The first 15 minutes or so were quite atmospheric (I even jumped a little at one point!). But after that it just turned into this predictable ever more boring non event, with too much extra added cgi and not enough Sam Raimi inspired cheap and cheerful gore (well, they were pushing this as an Evil Dead 4 wanabe so they were just asking for it). Too much screaming and wailing on the soundtrack, yet somehow that still wasn't enough to stop my eyelids from getting ever more heavy as time wore on. And on. Very disappointing. 4/10.

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 5:27 pm
by Heiko
Okay, so this is supposed to be Evil Dead 4?!?!

Yeah... right!

If they had said that this movie is in the line of the original Evil Dead that would have been fine: cheaply made, pure B picturedom, corn, entertaining...

but with the way ED has 'evolved' this is a gazillion miles away from what I would expect ED4 to be.

Having said that, my biggest beef are the CGI undead and the fact that the 'beautiful young woman' banshee looks like a badly made up transvestite.

While CGI can create some interesting effects, it is also the cheapman's box of tricks... and yes, here the ghost just look cheap :-( and not in a groovy way cheap but really in a bad way cheap.

Re: Damned By Dawn

Posted: Tue Aug 31, 2010 6:31 pm
by mamawaldi
Worst film of the day. I've seen scarier ghosts in scooby doo.