Movie Review: Dawn of the Beast (2021)
The monster vs. monster fight we didn't need.
*Spoilers ahead for Dawn of the Beast (2021).
Hello again! It’s been a while, and I figured we’d just jump right back into it. I’ve changed up the format a bit, trying to make things a little more streamlined for my own satisfaction, and I hope you like it.
Cast & Crew
Director: Bruce Wemple
Writer: Anna Shields
Producers: Roger M. Mayer, Anna Shields, Cole Payne
Cast: Francesca Anderson (Marie), Adrián Burke (Chris), Ariella Mastroianni (Isabella), Chris Cimperman (Jake), Roger M. Mayer (Unnamed Cashier), Willard Morgan (Dr. Dennis Kasdan), Grant Schumacher (Everett), Anna Shields (Lilly), LeJon Woods (Oz)
Makeup Department: Jared Balog
Soundtrack: Nate VanDeusen
What’s the spoiler-free run-down?
Rotten Tomatoes has what seems to be the official description of this lovely jaunt through the woods, although I’ll have you know there are no reviews from either critics or the audience. In fact, Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t even seem to think that it’s been released yet — so if that doesn’t make you want to check it out, I don’t know what will.
Aiming to see Bigfoot, students venture deep into an area of the Northeastern wilderness that is known for its strange creature sightings. Soon, they learn that there is a much more sinister evil lurking in the woods -- the Wendigo. [Rotten Tomatoes]
A notable point that I sadly didn’t discover until after watching this movie is that the director, Bruce Wemple, actually has two movies from 2020 that introduce us to his cinematic universe’s versions of Dawn of the Beast’s monsters, Bigfoot and the Wendigo. Anna Shield, the writer, also worked with him on Monstrous (Bigfoot’s introduction). Monstrous comes in with an audience score of 21% and a Tomatometer score of 60%, while The Retreat (a chilling tale of the Wendigo) is slightly more highly rated with an audience score of 39% and a Tomatometer score of 67%. Having watched these monsters duke it out in Dawn of the Beast I’d rather watch the Wendigo origin story than Bigfoot’s, but that’s just me.
So… what happened?
We kick off the movie with a bit of text block exposition, which I sometimes find a little lazy. You can usually get this information established more naturally if you feel like putting some work into your script and getting one of those good old fashioned creepy harbinger locals to outline to our young victims (and viewers) what horrors lie in store for them. Or even an overly informed professor-type — which we actually have here, criminally underutilized, in this movie! But, hey, a text block is fine too.
There is an area deep in the heart of the northeastern wilderness known for its recurring sightings of the legendary Bigfoot.
Since 1985, there have been over two hundred eyewitness accounts of strange creatures living in the forest. All have occurred between the dates of September 4th and October 2nd of each year.
In that same time, there have been 54 reported missing persons cases or deaths.
To this day, the reasons for the disappearances are still unsolved.
The locals refer to this time of the year as… the dead month.
Oooo, creepy. I got chills. I wonder why Bigfoot is only active for less than a month every year, and why the Wendigo loves September. Maybe Green Day knew about the Dead Month and that’s why they wanted to sleep through it every year.
Now that we’ve gotten that established, let’s jump into a prologue sequence! Another interesting choice, I have to say. Often it’s just a good way for us to see the monsters kill someone we don’t care about in a gruesome and satisfying way, before we have to deal with all the icky feelings that we attach to the characters we actually spend time getting to know. Which isn’t actually a problem with this movie, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In said prologue we meet Everett and his girlfriend Marie, who live out in the woods and are settling in for the night. Marie is putting on a necklace that she just got, with a large eye-catching blue jewel, and it may or may not be implied they stole it? It’s unclear. In any case, Everett goes out for a smoke, sees a light flickering by the edge of the trees, and goes to investigate. He then sees glowing eyes in the dark and heads back for a flashlight, telling Marie to stay in the house. We see creepy eyes over her shoulder as well, reflected in the window. That is honestly the best and most effective part of this movie — the eyes are creepy as hell. Marie, naturally, doesn’t hear Everett’s warning but does hear some creepy growling so she decides to go investigate the bushes without any sort of defensive weapon. As you might expect, Marie is dragged off and murdered by what Everett thinks is Bigfoot. It’s very sad.
Ten years later, a professor and his graduate students are heading off into the woods to go Bigfoot hunting for a… class project? I’ll be the first to admit that I’m probably overthinking this, but I really don’t think any reputable institution would offer a course on Bigfoot for a graduate program. The locals warn them that’s dead month, as they are contractually obligated to do by the horror movie gods, but these kiddos don’t listen to the gruff-but-kind unnamed cashier.
Now let’s meet our cast of characters, shall we? There is Dr. Dennis Kasdan, professor of all things that go bump in the night, and his TA Oz. The students, who are all finishing up their Master’s, are Jake, Isabella, and Lilly. Chris is the only non-student tagging along and is established as Isabella’s sorta lame older boyfriend who didn’t realize there wouldn’t be cell service out in the woods. He’s also the most relatable one in the bunch, as he’s the only one who seems to find Bigfoot hunting to be kind of a joke rather than an actual course of study.
We start with a walk in the woods, giving us a chance to get to know them a little more and setting up each character in their own way. This part of the movie is slow and not super effective, because I don’t end up liking any of them.
Chris gets distracted by a bird, as he is apparently an avid birder (honestly, not the lame thing that this movie makes it out to be when the other characters are actively expecting to find BIGFOOT), and the others go on ahead. Dr. Kasdan is as spacey as you might expect, and his TA is clearly just obsessed with the idea of cryptids. He also insists they go off the trail which is the first and clearest indicator that he is an idiot. Isabella doesn’t seem to care about much of anything other than being oddly controlling of Chris (she insists he wears khakis… why?), Jake just listens to Isabella explain how Chris is boring but nice and he’s the one with the car, while Lilly is the type of character that rolls her eyes at everything and everyone. A charming bunch.
Lilly gets off the path as well and runs into a stranger, who is revealed to be Emmett — from the prologue! He’s missing an eye now, so you know he’s been through some shit. He’s hunting Bigfoot, as he still blames the creature for his girlfriend’s death, and Lilly is appropriately creeped out and says some nasty things and GTFOs.
Meanwhile Oz, Isabella, and Jake find a skeleton in the field and decide, after a sadly short debate that Oz wins, not to report it to the authorities until after they leave. He doesn’t want to interfere with this “once in a lifetime opportunity”. I don’t know, I think helping to solve a missing persons case would be on par with finding Bigfoot, in my own personal book of life accomplishments. But I’ve never been in a situation where I had to choose between a mythical creature hunt and identifying the corpse I just found, so I guess we’ll never know. As they leave, Isabella sees a very familiar looking necklace on the skeleton (RIP Marie) and decides to tamper with a crime scene and steal the necklace off the corpse. She’s clearly a wonderful human being and very level-headed.
Settling in for the evening, the group almost immediately splits up. Chris is trying to make friends and everyone thinks he’s lame, so he goes to find a book to read. Isabella is pissed there’s no wifi in the middle of the woods so she hops in the car and Dr. Kasdan joins, very abruptly, because he… forgot his anniversary? Honestly it seems like he’s lying, like maybe he doesn’t want to talk with Oz about dead month, but that line of thought never goes anywhere so maybe he’s just a very strange and unrelatable man who honestly did forget his anniversary when he went off Bigfoot hunting with a bunch of his students. Idk man. Lilly hops in the shower and is promptly kidnapped by Everett, who tries to use her as bait to catch Bigfoot. Jake is listening to music in his room, alone, and hears none of this.
To loop back to on of the more interesting of these developments, the book Chris chooses is clearly homemade with descriptions of a Wendigo and charcoal drawings that devolve into just the words “Here They Come”. Not creepy at all, super normal. He doesn’t seem bothered. If this whole section had focused on the book more than the other very odd plotlines, the overall story may have actually felt cohesive. But instead, we get this nobody who doesn’t know what he’s looking at accidentally giving the audience some much-needed context for one of the two big baddies in the movie.
Isabella and Dr. Kasdan, meanwhile, are attacked in the road and total Jake’s car. Dr. Kasdan is pulled from the car out of the passenger window — we later see his body strung up in the woods so he’s super dead. Sorry to his wife, I guess, for the really shitty anniversary present. Isabella is possessed by the Wendigo and we see her body freeze in place and her neck snap. This is it’s MO — it kills you, then possesses your body and turns you into a creepy glowing-eye zombie.
She isn’t immediately possessed, though, and walks back to the cabin and is found by the others, who are appropriately confused. They just send her to bed and don’t seem to realize something is terribly wrong until Chris mentions the Wendigo and Oz freaks out. Apparently he knows about it but wasn’t expecting it to be out here, and it’s extremely evil. He is now terrified and wants to leave as soon as possible — but there’s no car!
Outside the cabin, in the woods, Everett is explaining to Lilly that he’s been out there every year during dead month for the past ten years trying to kill the thing that got his girl. In all that time, how did he never see the Wendigo? It’s established later that it’s actually what killed Marie, not Bigfoot, so it’s clearly been out there. Why is this the year that shit goes sideways for Everett?
He ties her to a tree and sets up in the woods, ready to shoot anything that goes near her and — he’s caught off guard by the Wendigo’s creatures and killed. Seriously, he never saw these things before? How did he lose his eye? Bigfoot?
Lilly manages to escape and runs from the creatures but they follow her back to the cabin and break in. Isabella goes fully off the deep end after a solid scene where the shadow of the Wendigo fully possesses her and she kills Oz, and now it’s a classic “the monsters are inside the house” situation for Chris and Lilly.
Jake dies pretty quickly — his character had next to no purpose in this movie.
Lilly threatens to leave, saying she’d rather save her own skin than die. Which, fair, but in that case why did you run back to the cabin in the first place? Chris wants to save as many as he can (everyone else is dead but he doesn’t know that yet). They have an argument where he calls her an asshole and then they end up escaping the house together anyway! Yay for pointless drama!
Despite her general badassery, Lilly dies almost as soon as they run out into the woods when they are attacked by the Wendigo’s minions. I consider it a plot hole that she is the most badass of the characters and that she is played by the writer of the movie. Just like it’s a plot hole whenever Adam Sandler writes a rom-com where he ends up with an attractive woman half his age.
Chris is all alone, and preparing himself for his last stand against the Wendigo. All is definitely lost. And then! Bigfoot appears!
Bigfoot and the Wendigo’s minions (the Wendigo itself never actually attacks anyone, as far as I can tell) have a boss battle that is admittedly pretty dang cool, although I could have done without the blaring dubstep soundtrack. No Godzilla vs. Kong by any means, but a pretty solid fight for a B movie.
Chris makes it out of the woods and to Everett’s car only to be attacked by Isabella, who has gone full Evil Dead. She grabs him through the windows so he jumps into the bed to hide, finding a can of gasoline and matches. She goes up like a Christmas tree in July and he ends up having to throw his khakis into the blaze too (which she had pressured him into wearing earlier in the movie, it was a whole thing. I don’t know why you’d insist on your man wearing khakis).
Just as he is about to escape, again, undead-Everett shows up. So many last-minute zombie fights. He spouts some nonsense about this all being about the necklace, from the prologue, before ranting about how hungry he is. I think this speech was supposed to summarize the true motivations of the Wendigo, but it didn’t make much sense and at this point in the movie, I just wasn’t interested. Chris decapitates him with a shovel.
Now bruised, injured, pant-less and covered in blood, Chris begins to hike into town. A car drives up after what I assume is not very long and, lo and behold, it’s the unnamed cashier! He laughs Chris’s woes off as just being a part of dead month, and off they go into the sun(rise).
Fin.
Thoughts?
Honestly, this movie wasn’t great but I also didn’t hate it. The script needed some serious work, especially in the beginning, but it had good monsters. The Wendigo was the best design, in my opinion, as were it’s zombie-minions. Bigfoot was fine. That’s all I have to say about that.
The characters were super thin, which is 100% of the reason that the movie wasn’t living up to its potential as a monster extravaganza. Everett was a wasted character, as was Jake. Poor Jake.
Also, the professor. Did he know? Did he just want to get them all killed? Why was he so weird about his anniversary? Does he even have a wife?!
In my opinion, they should have abandoned the whole college trip thing. These were just some friends, weirdly into cryptids, trying to get a picture of Bigfoot and make their millions. It honestly wouldn’t have changed much and then you probably could have gotten the whole exposition dump from one of the characters on the drive up when Chris, the unassuming boring boyfriend, asks why they’re going on this camping trip in the first place. Less weird unanswered questions, more opportunity for potential character development. Or keep the whole professor character, but actually use him as a source of information!
Technical Quality: 3/5
I was conflicted on this, but I settled on a three. It wasn’t bad, and I thought the effects were solid. It loses points for the plot, and I felt the writing could have been a little snappier.
Just the Vibes: 2.5/5
This was a solid middle of the road monster movie and I do respect that. It’s definitely not something you’d seek out for highbrow entertainment, but I wasn’t just laughing at all the kills either. Would be fun with a group of friends, popcorn, and a dark basement. Especially if someone had the foresight to string up some creepy “eyes” in one of the windows for an after-movie scare.
Things I enjoyed this week:
The temptation to list off things from the past two months or so that I’ve been MIA is strong, but I’ll settle for just a few bonus items instead. Bananagrams with friends is a classic, although I rarely win. The Habanero Mango aioli from Stonewall Kitchen is a delicious addition to any cheeseburger, and I made a soufflé cheesecake that tasted great even if it didn’t rise properly. My husband made me a jalapeno popper-themed chicken pot pie for my birthday that had two pounds of jalapenos in it and it was phenomenal. I watched Blade: Trinity (2004) and didn’t like it as much as I had the previous two installments (movies that break their own lore and established rules really bum me out), but then followed it up with War (2007, starring Jason Statham and Jet Li) and loved it so the evening wasn’t a total loss.
Ciao ✌️
Lauren