Dead Before Dawn
Overall Recommendation
Recommendation?
This had everything that should have come together to make something big. The parts, the whole, the effort, the work… No one is to blame here. It’s an ok zombie movie that relies on humor and predictability where it could have been interesting. Even the ending is straight out of a sitcom. I’m disappointed, but I’m disappointed in the same way I was after watching The Dead Don’t Die. This had a good premise, a good cast, great production values, even a highly polished script. But somehow, they just didn’t manage to make it into a good movie. I feel like half the actors thought they were in a Scream kinda spoof, a couple others wanted it to be schlocky-gore, and then there were the people happy to have work and not really willing to question the lack of direction that must have been like crickets chirping as everyone stood around, waiting for some hint of how to go about the scene. Everyone came into this too over-confident that they had a good thing, and as a result, no-one really struggled or put in work. No one gave it a chance to have zing. This is a Boston Crème donut of a movie. Yeah, it’s fancy and well made and all, but that doesn’t mean it’s what I want. This was just like that- too vanilla, too smooth. There’s nothing horribly bad about it, but it’s not good, and it really could have been.
Plot Autopsy
Plot Autopsy
- Some kid watches his dad die after playing with a snow-globe or something.
- Later in life, he has to watch over the store where his dad fed the Mogwi after midnight.
- There is a cast of a dozen and they’re all idiots.
- The cast is cursed, and quickly begins atrophying.
- A bunch of dumb shit about running around collecting shit to reverse the curse.
- “And then I woke up and it was all a dream. The end.”
Zombie Description
Zombie Description
This is painful to say. They mocked everything about the genre to give themselves a shred of originality. This is the Evil Dead playbook, but here, whatever the idiots propose curse-wise is what happens. So when they trigger the curse, they quickly play a game of one-upping each other as to how they can make the curse both more deadly and more ridiculous. They result in zombies that A:as humans, kill themselves when you make eye contact with them, turning them into B: Zombies, or, as this idiocy calls them, Zemons. Semens. Jumping Jesus on a pogostick, this is some trot-worthy blather.
Where the money went
Where the money went
This was a well-funded movie that spent all it’s dough being mediocre. It aimed for the blandest bucket available. I’m glad Christopher Lloyd seemed to be having a good time, I hope he made out well. The rest of this? Great zombie makeup, mediocre CGI, a cast of a couple hundred when it was called for… I think they either spent too much money polishing the script, or… shit. I’m at a loss as to how I didn’t like this.
Best Weapon
Best Weapon
I’m going with the toilet brush. I was being farcical when I mentioned it earlier, but nothing else really stood up or popped out and said “I’m the thing!” And this was after they had TWO different arming up montages. I’m tired of movies that have one, let alone two.
Can I get a hand?
Can I get a hand?
Yeah. I’ll slap you if you tell me you’re going to watch this.
That was new!
That was new!
I’ve never seen a movie where you can make a zombie your slave by making out with it. That’s just… I don’t want to say a bad word. But they just sort of threw it in there and used it when it was convenient… How, I have no idea. It was a really dumb idea that never should have gotten legs and I’m glad the movie is done and over with.
Review Notes
Review Notes
Wait… 3D? Am I in for a migraine?
Like, a kid in an occult store. Touching stuff.
Oh. I did not expect that! So, jumping right in!
I’m seeing shit. Llyod… fading in and out? How can both corded codes have dissonance?
“Well, I suppose I can always use my trophy case to store my very sad looking tribal masks.”
Ice cream?
They want him to go work in the store that his dad died in?
I’d murder his mom regardless of how she cuts crusts.
Generic good punk rock.
“However, when the eagle eats the ferret, it’s hard not to extrapolate the sexual undertones.” It’s that guy from Kids in The Hall!! SWEET!!
“I doodle with pencils.”
A… jealous shark?
“The guy who wrote you a poem comparing your hair to hot-dogs?”
“I never doodled you a doodle saying I like doodling.”
Online mugs? I’m a bit confused.
I… hate parts of this movie. Including the Hot Dog Mug.
“Hey man, I smell amazing now.”
She hates the Wildcats? I think I know someone who went to a Wildcats school.
We have all the college…. Ick.
“Let’s make like a baby and head out.”
But what I was saying is that we have all the personalities here. The rich jerk. The empathetic jock. The smelly sidekick. The no-backbone.
Big deal about that trophy. I’m still not sure what it’s for.
Back at the haunted dad-killing shop…
“I thought you had the footballs.”
“I… dislocated my appendix.” I mean, these are good, but they’re layered on too thick.
Ground rules? Is this Gremlins?
Oh, so the urn that killed his father is still precariously balanced on the same shelf.
Why don’t they just put it away in a safe with bubble-wrap or something?
Casper, you’re a bit sad.
And here comes the girls from school.
He is not smooth. Dude. Don’t give the merchandise away. You suck.
And the rest of the characters end up there too?
Casper, you’re an idiot. Who tries way to hard to be Archer.
Got the urn…
Dropped the urn.
An Ash Demon? They’re calling them Zemons. This is going off the rails quickly.
Hickies?
What the fuck?
French kisses? Slaves? 10pm? Football?
Panic mode.
“I’m not crying! I’m sweating in my eyes!” That’s almost as good as the line about wild onions in Re-Elected.
Fuck. Hungry.
Well, that doesn’t get an A for effort.
No eye contact after 10pm. Fuchsia. I always thought that was blue.
I’m having trouble with the phone bubble.
I like Ukulele.
I like the balcony. I like tiki torches.
The cheerleaders… have derogatory statements on their butts.
It’s 10pm…
“Casper… Are you on the weed, Casper?”
Wow. Creepy… I’m… on edge.
People are starting to act strange.
It’s hard to drink out of a hot-dog mug.
“I don’t know why I did thiiiisss…” as the guy jumps off the balcony. FUCK!
I did NOT expect that.
Football game…
What the fuck?? The guy is impaling himself??
And the skydiver’s corpse is gone.
What… People are killing themselves. Inventively.
I’m so hungry.
Oh, shit- mom just went and had her a White Rabbit bathtub moment a-la Fear and Loathing
“Say something ma, or I’m coming in, and that could get weird…”
How the fuck was I able to clog a toilet on a liquid diet?
So, mom is a zombie now, and she’s got electrical discharges coming from here. It’s essentially the same thing as Big Trouble in Little China, but I like it here too.
And… Toilet bowl brush is a early contender for best new weapon.
Oh, his mom was chasing him, in what was really good “Beginning of the end” footage, and then she got hit by a car.
“Please let it be a pig in pajamas…”
Why that guy grab his shotgun?
The football game has 4 survivors and 300 zombies…
“Somebody please carry me!” “I’m not fit for cardio!” The lines… it’s over-written.
Ok, I’m laughing as hard as I’ve ever laughed in a zombie movie.
“I’m going to go poop.”
“Wait… is this an intervention?”
So… the nerd has a huge adventure, and then there’s a Samoan zombie behind him, and then the girl with the crossbow…
Very awkward kitting up montage. Some of those weapon choices are crap.
Casper… Ha!!!
Oh, shit… Llyod is gonna notice the demon thingy has been set free.
“Great Scott!”
Zombies everywhere, trying to make it into an RV, all the windows are failing.
Why does the RV have blood splatter on the front when it’s been stationary?
Fuck, I’m hungry.
Story time… a joke about a curse. And Zemons.
Oh! Magic writing!
Yeah… I was wondering about that.
We have lost Lloyd.
“This curse is *so* complicated!”
Football player…
Ugh. That red out of Lloyd’s head really got to me.
This is the loosest, most disjointed movie… they already did this?
I get that this is parody, but it’s… cloyingly thick.
Well, I think that’s the final end of Lloyd.
And, well, that’s the end of the asshole jock.
And that’s zombie rednecks driving a buick with a shotgun. Unexpected.
Where did they get the grenades?
What the fuck is going on?
Seth, I got the munchies big time too.
And now we’re… HA!! Seth!!
“Time for Plan B.”
“We *have* Plan B?”
“No.”
So… is that guy turning into a zombie?
Yup. Immolation.
Ha!! That was a fun going out! One final leap of happiness…
Every time they say Zemons, I think they’re saying Semen.
YAY! Infighting!
I’m hungry.
I don’t think she’s perfect. She grabbed a mop.
“Is that a crow? Or an Eagle…”
RADIORADIORADIORADIORADIORADIORADIO!!
Tiny little toad heart.
Huge zombie Josh.
Professor Duffy is there?
A seduction?
French kissing a zombie? That’s gross.
But… effective.
She was… getting off on that?
Ran over… Duffy?
Inspirational friendship speech?
So many zombies. One jockstrap.
Oh! We have a bite!
“We gotta dig up my great grandfather. Like, literally. With shovels.”
YAY! Another little mini-story!
A dickie?
Uh… This has gotten darkly strangely darkly…
Ointment?
Oh, the shovel to the face.
Now the TA zombie is there with wine and flowers…
Bird. Just go.
Oh, shit! She just snapped her own neck!!
This is more bad French kissing than I’ve ever seen in a zombie movie.
And… Dez kills himself with bees?
10 minutes to go. Jesus, this went downhill quickly.
So many twists and turns in this plot, but it’s not really… worth anything.
And we have one good old grenade suicide- poorly CGI’d, and then…
Comes down to “And then I woke up and it was all a dream.”
“You’re my 38th favorite student.”
————End Transmission——————–
Introduction
Introduction
Gonna have to start this off with Day 2 of Liquid Diet and I’m hungry. Massive headache that I’m trying to work on with coffee. Had a great day at the gym. According to the wife, I ran two errands, or we have a ghost lifting toilet seats. I’ve got some mushrooms in me but I’m not tripping, or trying to. I want to be productive without getting lost staring at the ceiling. It’s a very fine line. “I don’t walk lines, Officer, I do them!” I wish.
A friend in college once smoked a bong-load of mushrooms, which resulted in a whole lot of coughing and drooling spasms and did not get the guy high at all. But, another friend of mine has been grinding them into a fine powder, which they then put into capsules. I want to know if snorting ground dried mushroom is a way to get the drugs into the system.
I remember reading about high school girls getting drunk on vodka soaked tampons (or something like that, I also watch a lot of really strange movies while on drugs) so I mean, if it needs to get into… wait. I wonder if the stomach does anything with the psylocibin to make it work in your head. What I mean by that is you can’t shoot a needle-full of mushrooms into your veins, but maybe you can skip that step and step up to the Hoover.
I read once that an old junkie trick was to scrape battery corrosion into heroin; pretty much get someone to poison themselves for you. I want to review Zombeavers now, but I think that’s one of the untouchables. So, I’ve figured out what I’m going to do with all the zombie movies that I’ve seen so many times that there’s no point in reviewing them as I can quote some of them line for line. “Would anyone like… a peanut?”
I’m gonna give them a slightly different treatment. Which… I haven’t figured out yet. When I began writing this, I thought I had, but then my devious little brain clicked into overdrive and now I’ve come up with some other interesting ways to revisit the greats. But keep in mind, I’m aware that the guide has very little of the well-known zombie movies in it. And that’s ok. “Perfection is the enemy of good.” Think that one through.
Here’s another good one. “Unarticulated expectations are nothing more than premeditated resentments.” I feel like I’m listing all the rules from ZombieLand. My parents both have Covid. They’re in their late 70’s and early 80’s. I kind of hope I live that long, just because I want to see how strange shit gets.
It’s gonna get weird and ugly before anything resembling beauty is allowed to flourish, and I doubt that I’ll get to see any semblance of balance or peace, but it’s a possibility that I’m betting against simply because you can’t wager on hopes, you wager on odds. No matter what Hollywood tells us. The underdog rarely triumphs, and when done, only is so due to the corruption that lurks beneath the foundations of anything so arrogantly planted as thought to be permanent.
I’d like to come back as a dolphin, once the world has ended. I want to swim among the ruins of skyscrapers. I would swim through the ruins of skyscrapers as is, no dolphin-ing required. I can’t let my wife read that or she’s going to think of Tusk. I guess what I’m saying is I’d rather be a fish.
I think I’m on this animal bend because of something I saw about Elephants on the TV while I was running at the gym. It was a pledge-drive, of some sort, and I marveled at the absolute unfairness that some animals have lobbyists. What would happen if all the non-represented animals unionized? We’re seeing it in Starbucks as we speak.
(Raises hand politely) I’d like to change the subject slightly to keep talking about Starbucks. I believe I first encountered one around Freshmen year of college. I was 19? 20? I’m 46 today and I still can’t remember the fucking sizes. Not because it’s particularly difficult, but because I fucking refuse to care and am essentially boycotting their size naming system.
Or rather, I used to do that; I’d walk in and smugly ask for a Large, or a Small. Make them speak my language. But today, I went into Starbucks and asked for a Grande. I don’t know why.
When I saw how little coffee I was actually getting, I really wondered why. I believe- this is me, being serious, using my masters degree- that at some point, a conversation was held in Starbucks Corporate, where it was pointed out that their unconventional naming system confused newcomers and stoners and children and if they’re going to market coffee to kids, they really need to call it Koffee for Kids. I’d pay for that.
But whales? Or, I mean elephants… I was on the treadmill watching the commercial and all I could think about was the whole Planet of the Apes thing, but with Elephants instead of Apes being the dominant species. On a 1:1 fight, I’m putting my money on the Elephant, you know? As if I have any left. The fucking Grande coffee cost $4.95, or $4.99, or something- I remember thinking “That’s not even a dollar a letter!” as if that meant anything quantifiable in the realm of contented coffee consumption.
Happily into the 2nd cup as we start the 2nd page, this is Kismet. Damn. I keep thinking about eating things that are solid. I may have acted in haste. And I noticed when I checked the calendar, get this; I’m not on this liquid diet for one week, I’m on it for two. I… I got nothing to say. I hope I live through this and all my old T-shirts fit correctly again. I hope I don’t kill my wife in hanger. So. Let’s describe what we’re talking about. This is my tried, true, and loved green health shake mix.
Put 3 cups of cold water into a blender.
Add 1/3 cup oats, 1 banana, a handful of prunes and a larger handful of baby carrots. Splash in a cup of kefir.
Add 1 scoop of pea protein, and then a tablespoon of whey protein powder, hemp hearts, ground flax, chia seeds, peanut protein powder, and powders both peptides and creatine.
Then stuff with 3 cups of spinach or assorted baby greens and blend until shaken, not stirred.
This “Hulk shits bad diarrhea”-looking concoction is… I can’t explain it. Except the flavor is… the way it makes me feel… I have made three of these drinks since I began this liquid diet. I think I’ll be drinking two per day for the duration. I’m gonna fucking do this, yeah!
And I have to sign up for the WordPress class too! Let’s get pumped up! I think the caffeine is finally kicking in a tad bit. He says as he yawns. That could be the mushrooms though. I am slowly wading through the long white morass of the uncovered page, navigating my way south, borne on by the winds of eloquent bullshit bound for shores of idle speculation and ill intent. I need to get to the part where I talk about a zombie movie.
There are a couple in contention for this evening. One, I sort of feel obligated to do, for cultural and general intelligence purposes. Juan of the Dead. “A group of slackers face an army of zombies. The Cuban government and media claim the living dead are dissidents revolting against the government. Subtitled.” This premise feels strange since it’s a play on words of Shaun of the Dead.
I also wonder how political it is going to aim for. Cuba used to be a really touchy subject, to some degree, and I’d kill someone for one of those large grocery store deli sugar cookies. What I mean by that is I’m fucking dying with the munchies here, and that Cuba used to be thought of with both distrust and longing. Cuba may not have been the forbidden apple of Eden, but it was a lovely peach that had clearly been labeled “Do Not Eat” by God himself. Because he was saving it for later.
Cuba is the land that time forgot, sort of… at least, it used to be. Is Castro still even alive? Nothing anyone does has any meaning. Yet it’s essential that you do it. There should be an alternative to “even if you chose not to decide, you still have made a choice”.
Where is the option to sit quietly on the sidelines watching everyone else sweat and bleed? That’s kinda what happened to Cuba after the missile crisis. I’m so fucking hungry I’m about to throw a loaf of cinnamon bread in the blender. Oh. Crap. Wait a minute. I accidently rented a different movie.
It’s a long story involving replacement cards and whatnot, but… Dead Before Dawn. That’s what I’m really watching tonight, since I paid for it and Juan of the Dead is Prime. Ok. Uh… “A group of college kids accidently create, and then unleash, a curse that makes anyone they come into contact with kill themselves and then turn into zombie demons.” Now, that sounds juicy, doesn’t it?
Let’s add Mr. Christopher Lloyd to the mix and get this baby up to 88 miles an hour! I never understood that. They used to believe that the human body would disintegrate once it went 100 miles an hour. I’m not sure why. I think they were just Debbie-Downers. But anyway, we’ve got zombie demons and college kids. Pretty sure I’ve seen this combination at least once before.