Making their way from Arkansas to California in 1857, the Fancher emigrant train stopped off in Utah for a needed break on the Mountain Meadows land controlled by a Mormon militia, overseen by the Bishop Jacob Samuelson (Jon Voight). Fearful of those crossing into their terrain after previous religious persecution, Samuelson takes his case to Brigham Young (Terence Stamp), who orders the emigrants to be slaughtered and the blame placed on a local Native American tribe. The situation is complicated by Samuelson's son (Trent Ford, a dreadful actor), who takes a shine to one of the Fancher women (Tamara Hope), and fights his fellows Mormons to keep her alive.

This is a brutal historical subject, but director Christopher Cain makes it impossible to take anything seriously. He's created a clumsy picture, unable to finesse its low budget into something compact and direct. Cain is married to his "Romeo + Juliet" plot and the more he tries to sell the unsophisticated overtones of love and hate, the more the film looks amateurish and silly. A veteran of the industry, Cain should know better than to reach beyond his grasp. His sloppy efforts to insert epic wrath into the fabric of the picture makes it all resemble a lukewarm "MAD TV" skit.

"Dawn" is drawn from thin material, perhaps better suited for a short film or a television special. On the big screen, the padding stunts the drama, leaving long stretches of the script where nothing of note actually occurs. It's one big buildup to the wargasm between the Christians and the Mormons, but Cain assumes it's his right to plod around the conflict as much as he possibly can in the name of "drama!" With actors this limited (the performances are atrocious) and one-dimensional, it's asking a lot of the audience to sit through more than what they absolutely need to.

The point of the picture appears to be the blunt mockery of the Mormon culture, but surely "Dawn" would be far more controversial if it didn't try so hard to be raw and unpleasant. Cain has turned the Mormons into baby-eatin' Nazis to suit his argument, parading around these black-clad, chin-bearded, testicle-slicing gunslingers without any thoughtful consideration. To Cain, the Mormons were hulking, borderline insane fundamental gorillas who flung excrement at anyone daring to besmirch the name of Joseph Smith (played by...oh man...Dean Cain), and led around on a dog collar by a Zod-like deity in Brigham Young. Of course, the recorded truth of the massacre isn't all that far from what Cain is dramatizing, but in a motion picture, with the images up close and personal, turning the film into a cartoon of cardboard good vs. evil looks unprofessional.

Cain's points are crudely made (the majority of the massacre occurred on September 11th! ooooooooh, ahhhhhhhhhh) and the film isn't interested in a rounded examination of religious extremism. "September Dawn" is more content poking sticks into the unknown to rile up sensitive viewers. It's a trashy, tasteless, and ridiculous film about a serious event in prairie history, eliciting laughter instead of education.