It's been almost thirty years since Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell broke into the biz with a little self-made horror movie called EVIL DEAD. Since then, the little movie (and its two sequels) have become classics. However, with the possible exception of Peter Jackson's DEAD ALIVE no horror movie has been able to match E-D. For all the little horror movies, for all the movies about zombies and ghosts and demons, nothing has the sheer invention, the cleverness, the fun of Sam Raimi's first. DAMNED BY DAWN seems to take a lot of cues from E-D. Even the name harks back to E-D 2's catch phrase "Dead by Dawn." And for a while it seems like it might just live up to the classic. It doesn't, but for me it is the closest a movie has come in the last decade of capturing that EVIL DEAD magic.
The story: a young woman returns home on the eve of her grandmother's death. That night she and her family are awakened by a spectral figure's horrible shriek. She pushes the figure off out the window, where it falls and is impaled on the fence below, but the figure was actually a protector and by intervering it allows the dead to rise and attack the family and now they have to find a way to survive until dawn.
Was it good?
Somewhat. It was good, but it had a chance to be awesome and, unfortunately, the second half let's the promising first half down.
The beginning is classic Raimi-style with a slow build as the daughter returns home and sees her dying grandmother. There's some odd things, some tension in the family, but nothing too obvious. Like the first twenty minutes of EVIL DEAD, it's content to let us meet the people and build some tension. After the mother dies, we see the special figure. It isn't attacking anyone. It's just standing on a balcony screaming, but what a scream! A piecing wail that wakes everyone in the house and sends them into a panic. It's a great moment. It's just something you've never seen and watching while this family, who is still dealing with the grandmother's death, now have to deal with this...well, it's set pieces like that that sets this movie apart from all the others. Most movies never have that moment, that something strange and new that even an experienced horror audience hasn't seen before. The fact that it isn't an obvious threat to the family -- makes it more interesting. What is it? What's it doing? How do you stop it? Well, the daughter finds a way to stop it, but unfortunately she learns too late she wasn't supposed to stop it! Now all hell breaks lose as the dead rise and all sorts of supernatural entities begin to attack the family.
This is the stuff great horror movies are made of. Unfortunately, it's also here that this movie fails to live up to it's potential. Now I want to mention a few of the shortcomings and what he does wrong that Raimi did right in E-D 1, but by no means do I want people to think this isn't worth watching -- I am recommending it, but I also think it could have been much, much better.
The first problem is threat. After they mess with the banshee, there needs to be a moment where we feel the threat against these people. It needs to be unsettling and intense. Sure, the dead rise and there are weird ghost things, but that's too familiar. Compare that to E-D when the girl goes out of the house and she is attacked by the trees. And not just attacked, but raped! WTF!!! That was a moment that set E-D apart -- instead of just being ghosts or demons, they were trapped by the very woods themselves. The fact that the trees didn't just attack her, but also violated her showed it was a movie that was going to be extreme and these people were in real trouble. This wasn't a "play nice" sort of horror movie. This was a movie that would F%%% with you. Unfortunately, there's nothing to match that moment here. Yes, the family is attacked by a stead steam of unpleasant things, but there's nothing quite as shocking, nothing as startling, nothing as threatenting at that tree scene.
Second is story. E-D has a nice, simple story. The read from the Necromicon, the demons come at them, then he needs to destroy the book to send the demons back to hell. Here, it isn't clear what they need to do once all the baddies start coming at them. The end happens in this cave nowhere close to the house. It all just starts to feel random. So instead of a movie that builds and builds, it's a movie that builds and falls and has ups and downs. E-D escalates by having Campbell's friends get attacked and then turned into demons as well, so now he has to fight his friends to survive. There's nothing like that here. They deal with zombies, they deal with weird spirits, they deal with other CGI type stuff, but it all feels random.
The third problem is the director. While he does a decent job, he just doesn't have the visual style of a young Sam Raimi and it hurts the film, especially in the second half when things should be getting off the hook and be cool. It needs more visual zazz! That lack of invention hurts the movie a lot.
It's disappointing. I'm even willing to ignore the bad CGI and make-up if the story had been tighter and the director a little more daring.
Still, while it isn't good enough to go with EVIL DEAD, it does have a lot of good stuff. I only hope the director pushes the script and the camera move in his next effort.
**** RECOMMEND ***
