In which our Final Girl transforms from shy, modestly dressed wallflower to sexy and fierce survivor while vacuum-sealed into a pair of extremely tiny Daisy Duke shorts.
Jeff Lieberman’s Just Before Dawn (1981) is an odd duck from the golden age slasher boom. Somehow I missed it all these years, but recently caught it streaming for free. It’s definitely derivative of similar mountains-and-forest-set slashers, yet also somewhat unique among its peers. The premise is Backwoods Slasher 101, with a blithely privileged group of beautiful young people hiking a mountainous region of Oregon to visit property that one of them has recently inherited. There, they become easy prey for an inbred killer stalking the forests. It’s what the film does with that setup that sets it apart from its brethren.
The cast of young hikers consists of Brian De Palma regular Gregg Henry as Warren, the de factor leader of the group; Deborah Benson as his sweet and shy girlfriend Constance; Chris Lemmon (Jack’s son) as comic relief Jonathan; his good-time, sexy girlfriend Megan, played by Jamie Rose; and Ralph Seymour as Jonathan’s brother Daniel. Veteran actor George Kennedy also turns in a perfunctory performance as a fairly useless forest ranger trying to find out who’s doing all this murdering in his jurisdiction.
The young actors share an easy rapport, helping us to invest in the hiker characters. When the mysterious redneck killer starts hunting them—or is it redneck killers? SPOILER FOR A FORTY-FOUR YEAR OLD MOVIE: its twin redneck killers!—we’re treated to some great set pieces, like one disturbing moment when a skinny-dipping Megan thinks Jonathan is playfully fondling her underwater in a lake, only to then see Jonathan standing over by the shore. Later, the killer confronts Jonathan on an unstable rope bridge in the second of two tense scenes on that bridge.
Lieberman and his cinematographers Joel and Dean King smartly utilize the gorgeous rural setting to their advantage, and Just Before Dawn is never anything short of beautiful to look at. Of course, the cast are all pretty easy on the eyes too, especially the lovely Deborah Benson, who blooms from a shy wallfower into the astonishingly sexy lead as the film progresses. For my money, Just Before Dawn achieves cult status thanks largely to Benson’s performance as Final Girl Constance. As the danger ratchets up, so does Benson’s sex appeal. Soon, Constance is dancing provacatively around the fire, then she’s ditching her buttoned-up clothes, tying off her shirt to expose a bare midriff, and slipping into one of the skimpiest pairs of Daisy Duke shorts the world has ever seen. She also lets her beautiful blonde hair down, both literally and figuratively.
Part of what makes Constance’s transformation into a sizzling sexpot so mesmerizing is that it happens as the horror escalates. It’s almost as if the closer danger gets, the hotter she becomes. Over the last act, Benson plays Constance as traumatized, at times seeming to be in a trance of sorts. It’s as if she’s slowly disassociating to protect herself. At one point, after her friends have been killed, Constance takes the time to put on makeup, which seems inexplicable, but symbolically represents ceremonially preparing for battle with the evil lurking in the woods.
Chased by one of the killers, Constance climbs a tree to escape, only to watch one of the grunting monsters chop down the tree with his blade. It’s a wild scene, and Benson’s terror feels real.
Near the end of the film, when confronted by the other hulking killer, Benson goes full-on feral in a wild and wooly fight to the death. As Final Girl vs. killer final fights go, this one’s epic, and Benson’s physicality is impressive. The entire film is probably most famous for the way Benson disposes of the killer, by literally punching her entire arm down his throat and choking him to death. That’s a move you don’t see often. Notably, Henry’s character Warren spends the entire fight scene cowering a few feet away from the action, having been stabbed by the killer. Like us, he watches in wide-eyed amazement as Constance tells all other Final Girls, “Hold my beer” and goes to work.
I’m not saying Constance is the best Final Girl of all time, or that Just Before Dawn is an unsung masterpiece, but Constance is definitely one of the most memorable Final Girls, thanks to Benson’s compelling transformation, and the film is an intriguing and distinctive entry in what was by then an overstuffed genre. Certainly, many elements of Just Before Dawn remind us of classic rural horror films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), The Hills Have Eyes (1977, or the glut of backwoods slasher flicks like Friday the 13th (1980) or The Final Terror (1981), and the debt owed to Deliverance (1972) is worth mentioning, too. Lieberman claims to have never seen those other horror movies and in fact comes off as a bit of a snob about horror in interviews, even though he made two other pretty good horror movies too, Squirm (1976) and Blue Sunshine (1977). Whether or not he was influenced by those earlier films matters not a lick though, because Just Before Dawn works on its own merits.
Just Before Dawn is currently streaming for free on Plex. Distributed only regionally upon its release in late 1981, the film was hard to find for a number of years before finally being released on various home movie formats.
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