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Released by: Momentum Pictures
Released on: 3/7/2011
Director: Brett Ansty
Cast: Renee Willner, Bridget Neval, Dawn Klingberg, Danny Alder, Taryn Eva
Year: 2009
The Movie:
Brett Ansty's 2009 film, Damned By Dawn, follows a young woman named Claire (Renee Willner) who coerces her boyfriend, Paul (Danny Alder), to accompany her to a remote part of Australia to visit her family. He agrees and off they go where he meets her father, Bill (Peter Stratford), her teenage sister Jen (Taryn Eva) and her ailing Nana (Dawn Klingberg). Things start off well enough, despite Jen's feeble attempt at cooking dinner, though soon Claire receives a visit from a ghostly woman with blood flowing from her eyes, a literal banshee (Bridget Neval) who is roaming the halls of the house wailing at the top of her lungs.
What Claire didn't tell Paul before they left is that her Nana sent her a bizarre package before they left. Not quite sure what it is, Claire soon finds out the hard way it has everything to do with the banshee and with the vicious scythe wielding phantoms that are now roaming the area and killing every living thing that they come across.
Dripping with atmosphere thanks to some fantastic camerawork and some excellent rural locations, Damned By Dawn is a whole lot of fun despite some obvious flaws. First off there's the fact that, despite a few good twists towards the end of the picture, some of this stuff feels a bit familiar. Comparisons have been made somewhat fairly to Raimi's The Evil Dead (something the packaging for this release touts) and the set up isn't that far removed from that picture. Thankfully, Ansty manages to take his film in a different direction, though the detriment there is that this direction involves some remarkably poor CGI that sucks you right out of the moment. Granted, this is not a huge big budget studio picture but the animated renderings of the spirits that rise and raise Hell are pretty horrible and look like something out of a late nineties era video game.
Once you look past that, however, this is a tightly paced and well acted movie that features a refreshingly smart (and attractive!) female lead and some rather clever set pieces. Ansty isn't above pulling out some cheap jump scares now and then but he doesn't rely just on loud noises and sudden camera jerks to get scares out of us. Instead he builds an effective atmosphere of impending dread and places in these situations some characters we get to know well enough to care about. Renee Willner is the best performer of the bunch and makes her character believable while grumpy Peter Stratford steals the show as her crotchety old father. The rest of the cast are fine as well, with Danny Alder's Paul having a rather unforgettable moment in the later half of the picture that delivers the goriest moment in the film (really, the only nasty bit in the entire picture). This might not be the more original horror film ever made but once you put it on you're not going to want to turn it off. It's entertaining, scary and fun.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Damned By Dawn looks good in this 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, though there are some compression artifacts rather noticeable in some of the darker scenes. Generally black levels look good though this film makes use of a very grim looking color scheme so don't expect much from the color reproduction, though it's all in keeping with the film's aesthetic, however. Since the film was shot digitally quite recently there are no problems at all with print damage to report, nor is there any grain, though a bit of video noise pops up here and there.
The only audio option for the feature is a rock solid Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound track, in the film's native English, with optional subtitles provided, also in English. This is a fairly aggressive mix that makes good use of the surround channels and provides a pretty solid low end. The wails of the banshee come through with piercing clarity and are quite a bit louder than the other parts of the film - keep this in mind if you're watching it while others are asleep (a lesson I learned the hard way - oops)! There's a lot of good sound effects used throughout the film though, and this mix replicates it all very, very well.
Extras kick off with a strong commentary track from director Brett Ansty who is joined by most of the principal crew members for a fairly interesting discussion about what was involved in putting this picture together. There's some good information here about Ansty's writing process, what made it into the movie and what didn't, location shooting, digital filmmaking, effects work and what was required of the various cast and crew members on the shoot. It's a good talk with a sense of humor to it but which at the same time manages to get across a good bit of information.
Equally impressive is the making of featurette which clocks in at almost an hour long. Here we get interviews with the cast and crewmembers as well as quite a bit of good behind the scenes footage and location shooting footage. We also learn how post production tweaking and digital effects were used to give the film the look that the director wanted. It's quite good, very comprehensive and it actually has quite a bit of meat on its bones. Aside from that, look for the film's original trailer, animated menus and chapter stops.
The Final Word:
If Damned By Dawn doesn't reinvent the horror film, well, it doesn't really need to. It builds nicely and despite some rather flaky CGI work manages to create a good bit of suspense and couple that with some strong jump scares. If it's not the most original concept ever made, it's still entertaining enough to work and Momentum's DVD offers it up in a nice A/V presentation and with some sold extra features as well. This one was a pleasant surprise!
