Brett Antsey's Damned By Dawn made its U.S. premiere at the L.A. ScreamFest on Monday night. From the title alone, Damned By Dawn seems like it's a knock-off zombie movie, where survivors must somehow make it to sunrise in order to survive a post-apocalyptic nightmare, but actually, it's more original than that.

The movie follows Claire (Renee Wilner) who brings boyfriend Paul home to meet her family: father Bill, sister Jen, and the slowly dying grandmother Nana (Dawn Klingberg), otherwise known as Dawn (get it?). Nana has sent Claire a present, something Nana has to keep far from the house (which she hasn't), and warns Claire that the Banshee is coming for her and not to interfere (which she does). After that, Claire and family must survive the night (and part of the next day and then more night) against armies of the dead that the Banshee has arisen.

For the first twenty minutes or so, Damned By Dawn actually seems to be on its way to being a very scary flick. The first time the Banshee arrives, in her wedding dress and bloody eyes, screaming her awful scream, Damned By Dawn is still a pretty creepy movie, but by the time the one actual zombie shows up and tries to attack the family by unloading his intestines on the kitchen floor, the movie starts to head downhill while Antsey starts to overcompensate for his small budget (he admitted it was made for $1.4 million Australian).

Suddenly, the cast is showered in digital fog, while Antsey trots out the Banshee and some flying, scythe-weilding skeletons to pour on the scares, but the CGI simply isn't efective enough to instill fear. The more the skeletons attack the family, the more the CGI starts to show and the less scary the movie becomes. The more the Banshee shows up, the more you can tell that it's just an actor in white make-up with fake blood in her eyes whose scream is starting to annoy.

Antsey has certainly tried for something original here, and the performance by Klingberg effectively sets up the movie perfectly. Antsey should have kept the movie a bit simpler, and less defined and used the Banshee with more restraint. A scary movie can still be made with little money, but if the movie has to rely on visual FX, you better be sure you have the budget for it. For instance, if digital fog didn't work in the higher-budgeted The Fog remake, will it work once you have less money?

However, given another chance and little more money, Antsey could very well deliver an excellent horror movie.