No press kit to speak of with this one, so I didn’t know exactly what I was in for here. (The flickery opening credits make it nearly impossible to tell who’s involved in the film as well; any name performers? I Don’t Know.) But with the opening shot of a house in the woods and a pair of young siblings driving down a lonely road, presumably in that direction, it looks like sinister doin’s may soon be a-transpirin’.
With a little bit of bickering the pair make it to the house after dark. The kids, Chris (Jonas Goslow) and Aurora (Najarra Townsend) are spending the weekend with their folks, Richard (David Coral) and his second wife Laura (Christine Kellogg-Darrin). Immediately there are some distinct overtones of family tension, but this is all brushed aside when one of Richard and Laura’s dogs, Brandy, runs off into the woods and is found wounded and bleeding.
As the dog is too badly injured to make it to the vet, Ben and Chris are forced to take her outside and put her down. Aurora wasn’t too pleased to be on the trip in the first place, and this just bums her out further.
Sentimental moments follow, but suddenly there’s a crazy guy (Danny Salmen) in the house; he manages to grab pop’s rifle and subdue the entire family, but he seems more scared than hostile. “It’s waiting,” he says, checking the windows. “It” has apparently just killed Crazy Guy’s girlfriend, and now, according to him, nobody’s leaving the house: it’s not safe outside.
A tense period of waiting in the dark follows. Aurora slips upstairs and gets Dad’s pistol, and the group manages to overpower the intruder; but when they try to call the police all they get is a mish-mash of jammed up signals: there’s no line out.
Crazy Guy passes out, and Laura notices that he’s got someone else’s blood all over him. He gets dragged outside and locked out, and a family fight breaks out for no apparent reason other than sheer stress and confusion.
Crazy Guy wakes up and begins banging on the door, begging to be let in; he says they’ll all be safe by dawn, but he can’t or won’t explain any further than that. Eventually Richard steps out and cold-cocks the guy, and they bring him back inside and tie him up. Then Richard goes outside again to try and contact the authorities on his truck’s CB radio. But first he goes for the whiskey he’s got stashed in the glovebox – the whiskey he’s supposed to have quit.
Laura did a little bit of bonding with Aurora earlier, and now she does a bit with Chris. To kind of counteract the constant quarreling that’s been taking place (and will continue). Meanwhile, outside, Richard starts hearing things and he wanders away from the truck with his gun and his flashlight.
Inside the house Chris hears something too, and while he notices through the window that Dad’s not in the truck, Laura decides her hubby has been gone too long and she steps outside to look for him. She finds the bottle, but there’s no sign of Richard. Then Chris goes outside, leaving Aurora alone, with Crazy Guy, without a gun. Which she must wish she had when he admits that it was he who killed his girlfriend.
Outside Chris at first finds no sign of Richard or Laura, and the truck CB is just spitting out the same jumbled signal that the telephone did. And then he finds his folks, down on the ground a little ways off in the forest. Richard gets up, but as Chris tries to revive Laura his father cocks and raises the pistol. “No,” says Chris, and a shot is heard as the scene cuts back inside.
Where Crazy Guy is playing up the proverbial prophet of doom, telling Aurora that everybody’s dead and they’re going to be next. In a screaming spasm Crazy Guy slips out of his bonds and tackles Aurora, but Chris comes back inside with the rifle just in time. Chris had hesitated before, but now he puts a bullet into Crazy Guy’s shoulder without a second thought. The wounded man slumps to the floor, the lights go out, and Chris calmly puts another round into him.
Chris and Aurora hightail it outside and into their car, speeding off into the night. In no time at all something flashes, or seems to flash, across the dirt road in front of them, and their car goes flying off the road.
Aurora awakens in the upside-down vehicle, in the middle of a rainstorm, to find her brother trapped and seriously injured. “Run!” Chris screams at her, and she does, fleeing back to the house.
And there…
An exercise in paranoia and instability, and a not-too-far-off example of extreme family dysfunction, Dawning is fairly well put together but seems to lack a solid point: it’s simply a story about people freaking out for no established reason. The filmmakers capture the various conflicts well, and the cast is able, but there’s not much of a storyline here. And, as the film is staged primarily at night, there are a lot of those ‘shots in the dark’ where you can barely see what’s happening. Better than I expected, but not really a film that merits watching more than once.
– Tom Crites
- Interview with J.R. Bookwalter - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Andrew J. Rausch - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Rick Popko and Dan West - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Director Stevan Mena (Malevolence) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Screenwriter Jeffery Reddick (Day of the Dead 2007) - January 22, 2015
- Teleconference interview with Mick Garris (Masters of Horror) - January 22, 2015
- A Day at the Morgue with Corri English (Unrest) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Writer/Director Nacho Cerda (The Abandoned, Aftermath) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actress Thora Birch (Dark Corners, The Hole, American Beauty) - January 22, 2015
- Interview with Actor Jason Behr, Plus Skinwalkers Press Coverage - January 22, 2015
