Trailer:
Trailers, how we hate them. You see one somewhere and
think, "Wow! That looks like my kind of film!" and then you finally
see the frigging movie and feel more disappointed than, dunno, the day you
found out there really isn't a Santa Claus.
According to Bloody Disgusting,
Dead Before Dawn 3D, directed by
April Mullen of Niagara Falls, "the youngest and only woman ever to direct
a film of this kind", is also "the first live-action, fully Canadian
Stereoscopic 3D feature". We would hazard to guess that it is also the
first and only zom-com to have been made at Niagara Falls, and while it is not
the only zombie or zom-com film that we know of to have been made in Canada — Pontypool
(2008 / trailer),
a zombie film, and Fido (2006 / trailer),
a zom-com, both come promptly to mind — we are fairly sure that it does lay claim
to being the first Canadian zom-com that sucks.
OK, maybe it doesn't suck like Linda Lovelace or
Little Oral Annie, but it does suck in a micro-penis kind of way: as a zombie
film, it never scares and keeps the gore low, and as a comedy, the laughs are
too few. It is mildly diverting at best, the chuckles and rare belly laugh —
yes, it has some of both, but too few of either — over-shadowed by the all-too-regular
groans. And while two or three characters do eventually become endearing —
ebay-cup-dealer Seth Munday (played by scriptwriter Tim
Doiron), semi-goth good girl babe with moxie Becky Fords (played by
director April Mullen) and brainless cheerleader Lucy Winthrop (Brittany Allen), to be exact — most never transcend their
stereotype and the movie on a whole never truly becomes fun to watch. True, it
becomes a bit more bearable after the curse hits, but then stumbles in a big
way at the resolution, ending not with a bang or a wimper but, as it started:
predictably, and with a groaner.
Take away the demon bit, toss out the totally
unnecessary 3D effects, and all that's left is a blood-lite "horror"
comedy that not only suffers from too much contrivance and too many
unconvincing stock characters — beware actor Brandon Jay McLaren (of Tucker
and Dale vs. Evil
[2010 / trailer]), lest you
become doomed to always play the obligatory Afro-American/Canadian character,
eternally out of place amongst a circle of lily-white middle-class stereotypes*
— but that has, if you get down to it, been done way better before in much
funnier films, both "big budget" (Zombieland
[2009] and Warm Bodies [2013 /
trailer]), low budget (Return of the
Living Dead [1985 / trailer]),
and indie (Dead & Breakfast
[2004 / trailer]
and Zombies of Mass Destruction
[2009 / trailer]).
We came away from Dead
Before Dawn 3D seriously regretting that we hadn't simply re-watched Dance of the Dead
(2008 / trailer)
instead — which is what you should do.
*A typecasting all the more glaring, actually, in the disappointing TV series Harper's Island (trailer),
in which he is the only non-WASP amongst a huge gathering of the type of inbred
white folks who not only don't usually know any Black people, but also find
Asians and South Americans not proper as dinner guests. On Harper's Island, however, it must
be said that the filmmakers at least not only kept him around longer than most minorities ever survive on-screen, but he developed into one of the most fully-rounded, believable and likeable of all
the characters.
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