Damned By Dawn review

"Sick of waiting for Evil Dead 4? Check out Damned by Dawn" is the tagline that graces the cover of this film. Whoever had the balls to put this on the cover deserves to have said balls removed with a  butter knife. Yeah, it's that bad. It was a dollar to rent and wasn't worth the buck. This film was truly awful and I can't emphasize this enough. Well, onto the review.

The premise was actually decent: a woman returns home after a two year absence to find her grandmother on her deathbed. Her grandmother tells her not to worry, that she will be okay. The "lady of sorrows" is coming to take her to her afterlife. The Lady of sorrows is a spirit who cries for the dead and comes to take them safely to the afterlife. However, one must not interfere with the Lady or harm her in any way or else.....

I won't lie, the first fifteen minutes of this movie aren't bad. There is a decent amount of suspense built up and the thought of watching your loved one being taken by a spirit is heartbreaking. It's at this point, however, that all the good disappears from this film. What follows is an eighty minute borefest ripe with awful performances, poor character development, unforgivably poor character choices as well as truly horrendous CGI.

Of course, our heroine interferes with the Lady and this causes the dead to rise, for some unexplained reason. In addition, there is a mysterious urn that somehow has the power to fix everything, which our heroine is too stupid to even attempt to use until the very end. There is really not a good performance to be had, there are plot holes aplenty and all the "scares" are piss poor. Someone even had the brilliant idea that the dead would be flying skeletons (seriously! I wish I was making this up!) Army of Darkness used this idea twenty some years ago and their effects are far superior to this film. The skeletons look horrendous and while the Lady Of Sorrows seems like a cool villain, not the case. A white dress and some bleeding eyes are the only effect and it fails yet again.

Whoever put this film together really should be ashamed of themselves. I have sat through some truly awful movies and this one ranks right up there. What's even worse are the shameless ripoffs from other films that aren't even well executed. In addition, that quote comparing this to Evil Dead is truly an example of the shameless self promotion of an awful movie trying to ride on someone else's coattails. DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME. This film isn't even enjoyable in a "so bad it's good" way. If you do rent this, don't say I didn't warn you.

Highlight Scene: None. There wasn't a single salvageable moment to be had here.