Just Before Dawn (1981) on Netflix
Five campers drive into the Oregon mountains to see inherited land, ignoring ranger Roy McLean's warning. Two hunters enter an abandoned church in the same woods.
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- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb6.0/108,006 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes60%
Trailer
Plot summary
Drunken hunters Ty and Vachel enter an abandoned church in the Oregon mountains, where a laughing figure with a machete attacks Vachel, and Ty flees into the forest. Ranger Roy McLean comes across a van carrying five young adults: Warren, his girlfriend Constance, Jonathan, his girlfriend Megan, and Daniel, Jonathan's brother. They are bound for rural property one of them has inherited. Roy warns them not to go up the mountain, but they drive on and hit a deer. Ty stumbles out of the woods and warns them about demons. The group leaves the van and makes camp, where noises at night prove to be a prank by Jonathan and Warren. In the morning they walk to a waterfall and see a girl, Merry Cat Logan, singing before she spots them and runs off.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Just Before Dawn (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While shooting a night scene in the Oregon woods, the cast and crew of Just Before Dawn were left in complete darkness when the lighting failed for no explained reason; after several minutes the producer yelled "let there be light!" and the lights immediately came back on.
- Producers pre-sold Just Before Dawn, advertising George Kennedy and Linda Blair as its stars and Jeff Lieberman as director, and offered Lieberman more money than he had ever made to shoot the film in Oregon, a script he hated.
- The original screenplay, from a story by Jonas Middleton and first titled The Tennessee Mountain Murders and later The Last Ritual, gave the twin killers religious motives and ended with Connie forced to handle rattlesnakes before becoming one of the inbred villains' wives.
- Jeff Lieberman rewrote the screenplay from page one under a pseudonym, taking the name from the first and middle names of his nephew, who had just been born.
- According to actor Chris Lemmon, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens happened during filming, and he and the rest of the cast were away on a trip to the Oregon coast when it occurred.
- The church in Just Before Dawn looks authentically weathered, but was actually built for the production rather than found on location.
- Jeff Lieberman recalled that strangers turned up at the filming location to watch actress Jamie Rose shoot her skinny-dipping scene, word having apparently gotten out among the local forest rangers.
- Composer Brad Fiedel, later of The Terminator, made many of the score's ominous sounds from electronically altered recordings of his own droning voice, and the eerie whistling motif refers to the rescue whistle Warren carries in the film.
