Friday, January 17, 2020

Pray for Daylight – review


Director: Tony Bruno

Release date: 2005

Contains spoilers


This film is most definitely a micro-budget affair – but one that I felt had a neat little premise it played with and one that had heart. Whether it had decent sfx, well the poor video print disguised that so I can’t say, and the casting seemed to be more what was available rather than ideal… but no-one can take away that feeling of heart.

It is, in short, one that was a bit of a guilty pleasure and, after one of the more often used Nietzsche quotes, it starts in 1994.

testing the dhampir
We are in the Carpathians and a group of children are in a tent, with a woman (Sarah Martin) and a man (Rocky Lhotka) – she begs the man not to do it. He drops a blade to the floor and leaves and a second man (Conrad Zero), fanged, enters. He feeds on the woman and turns his attention to the children. One, a girl named Syeria (played young by Katherine Bruno) keeps calm, grabs the knife and attacks him. We see her eyes fade into her older eyes in 2006. What we discover later is that Syeria (Sasha Walloch) is a dhampir and the event a dhampir test.

Kristi Bruno as Cassie
In a bar, the barman (Joshua Kattelman) notices the present that Aiden Garrett (Trey Simmonds) has with him. He is meeting an old friend, Cassie Banning (Kristi Bruno), who vanished out of town three years ago. He tells the barman (and therefore us) about her family being slaughtered and that (essentially) she became a vigilante. The fact that Garrett is a cop should have been a factor between them but she actually became a vampire hunter and he is aware of the creatures. She arrives.

Saveau and Cassie
What we get then is a story about her becoming a vampire hunter but working for Eric Saveau (Rick Sullivan) – a vampire and ruler of the city’s vampires. She would hunt those who had gone bad (as Garrett points out, also his political enemies). She left after she beat a human hunter to a pulp, who was torturing a vampire girl. The girl didn’t survive. She has spent three years travelling and researching.

Lucretia and Syeria
Saveau is aware that she is back and so is his rival Lucretia (Robin Marie Whitt). When Cassie left, Saveau lost face and Lucretia is older than him and, though he is too old to be mentally controlled by her, the younger vampires are in her thrall. Cassie is rare, in that she can’t be mentally controlled by a vampire. Lucretia has another rare hunter – Syeria the dhampir, who she mentally dominates. She wants Cassie gone. It was this use of hunters by the vampires, the rare gift of being immune to their charms and the utilisation of a dhampir that worked for me, building some nice lore into the low budget flick.

the eyes have it
As I intimated above, the casting seemed to be based on who was there, rather than who was suitable for a role. The acting wasn’t necessarily brilliant either. However I was carried along by the lore. As I mentioned, the photography seemed poor but the terrible print (and resolution set at 360 p) disguised much in the way of poor cinematography. That said, the film is on YouTube so you can see for yourself; it is not on IMDb however (at time of writing). I feel churlish giving a free watch a score but problems on one hand, interesting story elements on the other – I’ll give this 4 out of 10.

2 comments:

Avindair said...

As the director of the movie, I'm pretty happy we kept it in focus.

The movie was made frankly out of a desire to see if we could do it. It was shot on a 3CCD camera with 4:1:1 color, shot at locations I could get for free, and was recorded by a couple of different sound engineers. It was an experiment made for all of $6,000.00 (with $1,500.00 going towards the camera,) so I'm not to displeased with it.

The best part is that it led to my working in the industry as a writer, editor, videographer, and even 3D Artist, animator, and eventually Creative Manager. So, for a "Let's-See-If-We-Can-Do-This?" effort (that I often call my "School of Hard Knocks Film School Final Project") I'm still pretty happy with it.

And 4 out 10? Yeah, that's fair. I'd do a lot differently now, of course. I'd re-shoot the bartender scene (we lost a local comedian last minute due to a family emergency, and I had to fill in with one of our sound guys,) I'd hire a second unit director handle fight scenes, get some stunt doubles, and...

...you get the idea.

Regardless, some 17 years after we shot it, it was a surprise to come across this.

Take care.

Taliesin_ttlg said...

Tony, many thanks for the insights and taking the time to comment. As I intimated for a budget (and wow $6K is a micro budget) I was rather taken with this, and I'm glad it led you into the industry. If you do get the chance to revisit ever then believe me I did think the premise was really worthwhile