...oh, how this viewer misses the good ol' days of late-night cable TV...that bygone era of wildly eclectic, after-hours television broadcasting cache of movies 'til dawn, which generously stretched from the stroke of midnight, up to the crack of dawn, on Friday and Saturday nights. Y'all remember those times, right?? An out-of-control, rable-rousing night of partying, culminating into a quiet, deadened and lethargic evening in someone's darkened living room, wherever the party might have been, that night (...now, now...you have your familiar post-party drunken scenario, I've got mine...if you please, just read on, OK??). If you weren't lucky enough to pair up with someone cuddly, in one of the assorted house-party bedrooms...and had not yet passed out from the varied and undescriptive alcoholic concoctions, which were being liberally passed around...you and whoever might have also been conscious at the time, probably found yourself on a beaten, battered and smelly living room couch, surrounded by the 'corpses' of passed-out partiers, with nothing but the cathode tube glow of the television, emitting a flickered eerie light, all about. Nursing a warm, half-bottle of...of whatever was closest, picking up the remote, and giving it the old 'click, click, click', you scan the channels, until...whoa!! Yeah!! USA Up All Night!!! Now, we're talking!!! Horror Flicks...Teen Sex Romps...Boobies...Dim-Witted, Monster Hunting Teens...Slimy Sci-Fi Space Junkies...More Boobies...Action-Filled Atrocities...And More Boobies...The Cheesiest of the Cheesiest B-Flicks Ever Made...with occasional, sometimes groan-inducing, sometimes genuinely knee-slapping commentary by...depending upon the night...Rhonda Shear or Gilbert Gottfried. Those movies...oh, those movies...titles like "Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-o-rama", "The Pink Chiquitas", "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death", "Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Outer Space", "Chopper Chicks in Zombietown", and countless others ; clearly, only a certain breed of film genuinely qualified for the haplessly respectable place of being broadcast on USA Up All Night...some of which proudly...or shall we say 'shamelessly' wore badges of respectability amongst undiscriminating cult film devotees (...for myself, I remember seeing USA Channel-truncated versions of "Day of the Dead", "Frankenhooker", "Killer Klowns from Outer Space" and "Basket Case"). Heck, even when trimmed for content, the hilariously scathing commentary by our illustrious hosts made up for content-restrictive editor's hand...we're talkin' the type of films that shamelessly defy criticism...that cross the line of being coined 'bad', and well into the arena of 'embraceably ludicrous'...yes, THOSE kinds of films...films like...well.....
...poor Casper Galloway is in the throes of a dilemma; indeed, hopelessly pining over the most attractively brainy, beautiful and popular girl on campus...yet, a girl who clearly wouldn't glance at him, twice...has taken up a good portion of his time, but that's not the problem, at the moment, You see, it seems that his eccentric uncle has asked him to look after his occult-based curator shop, while he goes out to accept a prestigious award...a dark, grim and eerie-flavored shop, which Casper had sworn never to go back into, after the tragic death of his father. However, on this occasion, Casper reluctantly decides to bite the bullet, cinch up his man-pants, and resign himself to helping his uncle out. Of course, before tossing Casper the keys, his uncle lays out a few ground rules...with the utmost rule being that he is not to touch the strange-looking clay urn, capped with a human skull, which sits on that (...pointing) high shelf, and...what?? Is that urn glowing and pulsating from within?? Nahh!! Couldn't be...
...anyways, later that evening, several of Casper's friends happen to stop in, at the shop...accompanied by the gal Casper is dream-smitten with. It seems that this gal is also interested in the occult, having stopped in the shop many times, and had often been curious about the strange urn, sitting on the shelf. Recalling his uncle's stern instructions, Casper naturally climbs up, retrieves the urn, and before anyone knows it...CRASH!! The cursed urn shatters on the floor. With Casper in a stuttered panic, frantically claiming that they were all now doomed and cursed (...and not by the anticipated wrath of his uncle, which proves to be the least of their problems), the others in the group amusingly and laughingly wonder what the curse might entail...suggesting that perhaps the curse might involve anyone who meets their gaze, will become irresistibly compelled to kill themselves...after which, they come back to life as demon-possessed zombies (...or 'zemons', as they are later coined), not hungry for flesh or brains, mind you, but mindlessly crazed to give their victims hickeys...hickeys which in turn, transform the recipients of the hickeys into 'zemons'...and the hapless group have until dawn to break the curse, or they will be doomed forever. Oh yeah, and by the way, one can enslave a 'zemon' by french-kissing it...yeah, no kidding...
...leaving the shop and going off into the night, the hapless group laughingly lambasts the idea of the curse...except for Casper, of course, who frantically goes home...only to meet the gaze of his mom, who questions his recent behavior as possibly drug induced. When Casper later discovers that his mom has not only killed herself in the bathtub, and has come back as a zemon, he rushes out in desperate search of his friends...who by now, to their horror, have already found out what he already knows, with the entire town now in danger of being infected. Their mission?? Taking weapons in hand, and boarding a trusty Winnebago, they head out to kill the zemons, break the curse, and hopefully set things to right, before Casper's uncle finds out what happened. And their odds on doing all of this...eh, not so good.....
...what?? What's that, which this viewer hears being shouted from the back of the room?? '...uh, that's dumber than dirt', huh?? Ludicrous?? Outrageous?? Why, yes it is...and that's what makes a silly little horror flick like "Dead Before Dawn", so amusing and irresistible. Yes, half the jokes in the film are so eye-rollingly dumb, one almost expects the characters in the film to break that certain barrier, take a brief vaudevillian second to look at the audience, and wave them on, indicting, "...uh yeah, you're supposed to laugh, here...", but again, that's what's so ideally nutty about this hokey little film. OK, yes...the film itself shameless wears the atypical horror ensemble textbook setup, in the onset...you know, the group's prerequisite stereotypes...the jocks, the druggie, the brainy beauty, the nerd, the bubble-headed cheerleader, the smart-aleck, etc; however, these differences come into play quite cleverly, when the effects of the heckling, randomly invoked curse, kick in. Clearly, the filmmakers had an embraced love and appreciation for those similarly tsk-inducing hokey and knee-slappingly corny cult classics from the '80's, and their further subsequent cult status achieved, when broadcast on late night television venues, such as the aforementioned USA Up All Night, as "Dead Before Dawn" assuredly reflects that embraced appreciation. One could go as far in saying that "Dead Before Dawn" would, without missing a beat, not look out of place, amidst heavenly horrid titles like "Assault of the Killer Bimbos", "Vampires on Bikini Beach", "The Stoned Age", "Return to Horror High", "Joysticks" and "Flesh Eating Mothers" (...which, by the way, ALL saw their honored presentation, on the fervored USA Channel late-night venue)...
...and what can one say about a cast of talented youth, who clearly had a blast, in engaging this production (...I mean, why else would one WANT to have something like this on their resume?? Something to look fondly, jovially...or perhaps embarrassingly back upon, in one's humble beginnings??), with respectable performers as Devon Bostick (...of the "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" films), Martha MacIsaac (...most prominently of the "Emily of New Moon" series) and Brandon Jay McLaren (...whose respectable work in television stems back to his role in the "Power Rangers S.P.D" series). Of course, we just have to have a 'name' here, and as far as that 'name', it was delightfully out of left field, to see veteran actor Christopher Lloyd in these crazed proceedings, as the occult shop's owner; his role in "Dead Before Dawn" might have been minimal here, but even minimally, his character proved catalystically outrageous and riotous funny, especially when he bec...Whoops!! Don't want to give too much away, don't we?? Heck, it was worth the price of admission, just to hear him jutt out the occasional and exclamatory "Great Scott!!"...
...with special effects and gruesome make-up work, gory and jaded enough to satisfy, but tempered enough to be as comically funny as the film's outrageous scenario, itself...as well as 3D effects that are adequete, but hardly necessary..."Dead Before Dawn" just might be dumber than a bag of hammers, but once engaging the film, one might want to prepare to catch one's self giggling along with the rampant, albeit horridly goofy gags. A laugh riot is to be had here, to be sure...that is, providing you remember to check your brain at the entrance. Oh, and rest assured, Rhonda Shear and Gilbert Gottfried would've had an absolute field day, heckling this one...Ah, if only.....
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