Damned by Dawn (2009)

Having a wicked time with grandma

This low-budget Australian horror plays on the legend of the Banshee, combined with evil ghosts and your loved ones coming back as the living dead. The story is incredibly simplistic as this plays more so on a steady mood and the survival horror genre with characters running back and forth in the midst of spooky settings to save their lives.

A woman named Claire is visiting her family with her boyfriend Paul at her family's farm house. The place is filled with shrouding fog, naked trees, playful shadows and thunder storms on the rise. A spirit is seen roaming the forest when Paul picks up take out food but like everyone else is oblivious to the ominous signs and doesn't trust his own eyes. Her grandmother, Dawn, is on her death bed and they speak about the mysterious vase Claire was entrusted with but she doesn't make sense of it at the time; her Nana's ambiguity is the catalyst for the events and Claire has to clean up the mess due to her senility--not exactly the most effective transitional mode to perpetuate the story. Before bed there is a mysterious screaming sound coming from afar. Some of the family goes out to investigate and soon enough the piercing sounds are identified as coming from a tattered clothed woman with bleeding eyes and a supernatural aura that allows her to float--the Banshee herself. Soon enough the dead start to rise from the earth to take the family members lives one by one.


The major strength of this film is its atmosphere and settings and honestly not much else. A share of this looks to be some kind of dreamscape in that it has its own altered reality. The movie is persistent to the point where it makes it seem like an hour and twenty minute thrill ride with exaggerated jumps, scares and loud noises to jar your senses. Likewise, it doesn't have substance but it does play on surface sensations. Though the actual underlying story and character archetypes after awhile start to feel paper thin and to lose intrigue despite the constant mood--that's usually why those rides last less than twenty minutes. After a while, the situations feel more like random events in a Halloween haunted house than part of a linear storyline where the characters walk and run around not knowing which angle they're going to have a fright from or what to do for that matter themselves. Their actions are simple: run, trip, explore and when lucky shoot with a rifle. This has some breaks where the characters charge themselves and try to figure it out: some moments work well with anticipation, while others feel like they're stretching out the time with filler.


"Damned by Dawn" includes the standard survival movie template: the most capable character perseveres as those around her die until she can figure out how to stop the antagonist. Though instead of having some kind of intuition to make her someone to carry the picture with staying power like, say, "The Evil Dead," which this takes influence from, she appears to get lucky and without always getting a solid footing on the ground. The CGI monsters are about as dated looking as a '90s Playstation video game, though to its benefit are often covered up by the excessive use of fog; it's to the point where it makes the pool halls of "The Hustler" look like breathable air. Some of the other effects are effective and by contrast it makes these noticeably distracting. The dead come in a few forms: flying skeletons, grim reapers, zombies. Their mechanics are inconsistent in that they move quickly at some points and then at others, when the characters are wide open, start to creep as if they suddenly forgot that they can actually speed along. The dialogue and performances are hit and miss. In the calmer scenes they hold their own, though when some of the action picks up it's as if they're speaking from the script instead of becoming a personality in their self. Makes you wish they would have kept a few lines to themselves but then instead spoke up to fill the audience in better about some parts to its conclusion. Recommended only for someone who wants a simple supernatural horror to completely shut off their brain with and let themselves go with mood.

Rating: 4/10

Director: Brett Anstey
Link: IMDB

Scream of the Banshee (2011)

This chick can scream...but who'd date her?

This is a story that mixes Irish folklore with Templar knights that have locked away a secret for hundreds of years till it's accidentally unleashed in the modern day. It starts with more mystery and drama and then moves over to some more scares. The events unfold like a from-one-thing-to-the-next type of story mixed with amateur detective work since no one will believe such a fantastic tale anyhow but the few that seen it with their own bulging eyes.

In 12th century Ireland, knights are chasing a woman on horseback through the woods. A fight breaks out with some supernatural abilities shown and the victor, being the last man standing, decapitates the woman and encloses her head in a specially designed metallic box. Present day: an archeology professor is archiving historical artifacts when she receives an anonymous package with a gauntlet inside and a small map that hints at an additional item at the college campus she works at. She gives the task to her daughter and a false room is stumbled into with a medium sized crate that has Duncan written on the side. Inside is a metallic box that's opened by the gauntlet from earlier. It reveals a grotesque severed head with monstrous teeth. One of them disturbs it, causing the head to scream with such force that their ears bleed, only to then disintegrate with no evidence to show for themselves.

They begin to get haunting visits at night and strange occurrences as if something is trying to lure them out with a trap. They stumbled into more clues with a soothsayer named Broderick Duncan who used to teach at the same school. The Internet is a key player in their information gathering with videos from Duncan that leads them into finding out if you've heard the scream, it's essentially a death sentence. The daughter and mother are about to move around again, which causes tension to form between them and the daughter's new boyfriend. Though the romance angle between the two youngsters starts to distract from the story since it carries a contrasting tone and feels like fluff.

Some of the rules and mechanics line up a little too smoothly when the monsters appear and disappear. What's strange is the Banshee seems to wait around till it's convenient to the characters and how much development the audience is shown. It makes them unpredictable in a sense, but to a fault since you're not even sure what they're driving at. Your death? It makes it sound so mundane and one-dimensional when you have some rules for where they came from but not a solid reason of what they're doing there. The characters feel both totally safe to then completely in danger but without a balance in between to maintain the tension since there aren't very many rules in place to stop the Banshee and make this an engaging cat and mouse type of game on both sides. A share of the scares are extreme closeups and deafening sound effects with some strobes and unexpected events to catch you by surprise--to it's credit there's a reason for it. It's a good thing too as the flashing lights somewhat cover up some of the shoddy, thrown-together prosthetics and dated CGI work with good ol' smoke and mirrors.

"Scream of the Banshee" starts out on a high point with an intriguing premise with its own legend and rules, plus the way it was stumbled into makes it somewhat possible on suspending your disbelief. "Dead Silence" had some similar rules to its villain though both are completely different movies. This film only goes down hill from there as it begins to feel rushed to the point of nearly falling flat on its face and the audience thinking where did the picture go? The middle half starts to feel somewhat formulaic and not helped by the obvious editing trick that signals commercial breaks in between since it was also shown on the SyFy channel as a made of TV movie. The ending is a complete mess to the point where I'd have to have the patience of Dali Lama and another three paragraphs to break down the inconsistencies. Some of the dialogue at this point comes across as forced in that it doesn't always feel catered to that specific person playing the role. Some of it feels unauthentic enough to have been read just prior in a script. The motivations start to become nonsensical, anticlimactic and like padding to the run time, not to mention some of its prior story arcs were dropped and never picked back up. There's a decent movie in there somewhere, just whatever power above must have treated it like a stepping stone and had their attention/commitment elsewhere. The optimistic person in me can't get over how the movie can't hold up to such a cool title.

Rating: 2.5/10

From Black to Red recommends instead: "Dead Silence": Your scream is your death. So getting scared from pop outs and looming shadows is an integral part of the story that's also filled with atmosphere, engaging and memorable scenarios till the credits are rolling.

Director: Steven C. Miller (Automaton Transfusion)
Stars: Lauren Holly, Marcelle Baer, Leanne Cochran, Todd Haberkorn, Lance Henriksen
Link: IMDB