Main cast: Chris Cimperman (Jake), Ariella Mastroianni (Isabella), Grant Schumacher (Everett), LeJon Woods (Oz), Adrian Burke (Chris), Anna Shields (Lilly), Willard Morgan (Dr Dennis Kasdan), Francesca Anderson (Marie), Roger M Mayer (The Cashier), J Louris Jr (The Shop Owner), John Mac Schnurr (The Creature), and Shawn Maloy (The Sasquatch)
Director: Bruce Wemple
The premise of Dawn of the Beast is that there is an area in “the heart of the northwestern wilderness”, said to be bigfoot territory, where strange beasts are seen every year between September 4 and October 2. Also, during this period, so far 54 people since 1985 have been reported missing or dead. Well, our cast of idiots will soon add to the number, and it’s just a question of how many.
That’s right, during the “dead month”, as the time period I’ve mentioned earlier is called, Dr Dennis Kasdan leads a team of his students to locate a sasquatch — or, as the opening credits puts it, “squatch”. Clearly, these people — and screenwriter Anna Shields, who is also one of the main cast members and one of the producers — have never watched Night of the Demon or they would bring a few guns along with them.
They stumble upon a skeleton wearing some necklace, and of the idiots, Isabella, takes the necklace without anyone knowing. Well, the joke is on her, because the necklace attracts a malevolent force that soon possesses her.
If that’s not enough, she is then abducted by Everett, a man that lost his girlfriend to some… thing… in the opening scene that took place ten years earlier. He intends to use her as a bait to lure out the squatch sasquatch, whom he blames for his girlfriend’s death.
That’s right, there are more than bigfoots in this forest, and it’s going to be one night to remember.
I’ve read some recommendations that this is a better than usual low-budget B-grade horror flick, and since the new big studio movies are not catching my interest much these days, I thought I’d look this one up and give it a go.
As I watch it, the first thing I think of is Night of the Demon because it follows the same trajectory: bland and one-note characters whose names I can’t recall or bother to, much of the movie runtime is spent on boring human antics, and the bulk of the fun only happens at the tail end of the movie.
Compared to the older movie, however, this one actually has far better pacing. With the Creature as well as the Squatch Sasquatch running around, at least there are a few scare scenes to break the monotony of the early boring human antics scenes.
The acting in both movies, alas, is equally abysmal.
However, the final battle between the two monsters is a serious disappointment. It’s too quickly over and it’s also marred by terrible non-existent choreography and 1990s Playstation 2 cutscene realness complete with a jarring music track that doesn’t fit the scene at all. The whole thing is a most anticlimactic payoff for people that have stayed with it up to that point.
So yes, people that want to watch a gory bigfoot movie should track down the other movie instead. At least the movie, while boring for the most part, has a satisfying gory climax. This one just goes on and on, promising something good, but never quite delivering on that promise.
