Dead Before Dawn

It's possible that Google has sent you here as you searched for information on director Sam Raimi's Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn, the boisterously gory story of a man stuck in an isolated cabin desperately staving off legions of undead attackers. It's a great movie. This is not that movie.

No, this is a lackluster 1993 Cheryl Ladd vehicle that currently stands as one of the most formulaic Lifetime movies we've seen yet, which is saying a lot. Cheryl plays a woman married to a rich dude who owns a bunch of big companies and who, in his spare time, likes to smack around his wife. She wisely opts to divorce him, but then he hires an assassin to kill her. Hey, can you blame the guy? I mean, he tried smacking her around and she had a problem with that, too.

Anyhoo, then she's forced to fake her own death so the cops can catch the husband and the assassin. At this point, we tuned out. Hey, don't get all up in our grill about it. No one's paying us to watch these movies. It's not like we don't have dishes to do and stuff.

RATING: 2. The only thing about this movie that ruled was the hired assassin. He was this Asian guy and I guess in 1993 Asian-Americans were still kind of exotic or something, because when the husband first meets him he says, "I didn't realize you were... uh..." "ASIAN?" the Asian barks, raising his Asian eyebrow and looking all smug, Asian-style. If the movie had pursued this fascinating Asian angle further, who knows how awesome it coulda got.

Fake your own death at LMN's Dead Before Dawn website. They got a trailer on there, too.

Rod Stewart, who would never dream of beating up on Cheryl Ladd, tells her (lately) how much he loves her: