Today’s quick review: Dead Before Dawn. While taking care of his grandfather’s (Christopher Lloyd) occult shop, Casper Galloway (Devon Bostick) accidentally breaks an evil urn, cursing himself and his friends. Now anyone they make eye contact with will be driven to suicide and come back as a half-zombie, half-demon. As their town turns into a waking nightmare, Casper and his friends look for a way to reverse the curse before dawn.
Dead Before Dawn is a zombie comedy about a group of college students who unleash a ridiculous curse on their town. The movie offers an irreverent take on classic horror ideas, replacing the life-or-death struggle of a zombie outbreak with something petty and haphazard. Dead Before Dawn has a few good ideas that occasionally find their mark, but it lacks the foundation to make them work in a more systematic way.
Dead Before Dawn’s main failing is that it does not give its characters or its setting the chance to breathe. Instead of establishing a baseline for Casper and his town, the movie dives straight into comedy and throws its entire cast of characters at the audience as quickly as possible. Keeping up with the bombardment of jokes is a challenge, and the handful of successful ones are robbed of the build-up they need to truly be funny.
Dead Before Dawn also suffers from a heavily contrived plot. Governed by the rules jokingly invented by Casper’s friends when they broke the urn, the zombie demons are kiss-seeking monsters that behave differently from anything else seen in the zombie genre. But while the rules earn a few laughs around the edges, the arbitrary setup and comically inept characters make it hard to care about the story at all.
Dead Before Dawn is a horror comedy with a lot of energy but not a lot of focus. There is a fun parody buried somewhere in Dead Before Dawn, but the movie does a poor job of letting it shine. Those in the mood for something silly, irreverent, and utterly nonsensical may get something out of it, but anyone looking for a more carefully calibrated zombie comedy should look elsewhere.
For a similarly bizarre zombie comedy with a more abstract sense of humor, try The Dead Don’t Die. For a zombie comedy with a much better balance of character, action, and humor, try Zombieland or its sequel. For a more sinister, more insightful horror parody, try Cabin in the Woods. For a slasher comedy with a clearer vision, try Tucker and Dale vs. Evil.
[4.7 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1989485/). I give it a 5.0 for spirited comedy that lands wide of the mark.