THE STAY AWAKE
Directed by John Bernard. 1988. South Africa.
I’m not going to bury the lede here: John Bernard’s THE STAY AWAKE is absolutely fucking dreadful. This review will not be kind or measured. No pats on the back will be given. I will refrain from ranting like a lunatic, but make no mistake. I hate this movie with every atom of my body. I would watch it again only if it appeared in a snuff film, flayed and torn apart, with its broken and battered plastic case burned to ashes after the long, satisfying torture of the accursed videotape it once held. It is loathsome and repugnant on an atomic level.
The film begins in 1969 in America. A serial killer is led towards a large gas chamber. We frequently cut to old crime scene footage of his victims, the bodies of women lying dead and battered on the ground. These scenes remind us that HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER did the same kind of thing, only better. We wonder why we’re not just watching that instead. After all, it’s nowhere near as depressing as this puddle of pestilent puke. Once strapped inside the chamber, the soon-to-be-dead killer starts saying the usual horror movie killer shit like “I am the angel of darkness” and “I vow to return to contaminate your children”.
We then cut 19 years into the future, only we’re no longer in America. We’re in England. Or Europe. I don’t quite know. All I know is everyone has a British accent. We’re in a Catholic girls’ school, or rather, we’re in the gymnasium of a Catholic girls’ school, watching a bevy of students do some low-energy aerobics. While all this bending and thrusting is going on, a POV camera starts wandering through the halls, exploding beakers, knocking paintings off walls, banging on doors, and moving desks. We begin to hear low demonic growls. This is what we’ll hear on the soundtrack instead of the typical heavy breathing every single time there’s a POV shot.
It seems our dead serial killer has somehow made his way overseas to torment these girls. I wasn’t aware ghosts migrate. Are these girls the daughters of the American men who put the serial killer to death? If so, why do they all have British accents? Why do they all go to school together? That’s certainly convenient. A 70-pound woman calls a 60-pound woman fat. Someone complains about sweating. Then the radio melts, and everyone stares at it for three minutes. Spooky. Next, we meet Trish, the science teacher. Do these students live in the school building? Does the teacher live there too? Where is everyone else? There’s an old man with an apartment there. Is he a teacher, too? Fuck if I know, and the film never tells me.
So let’s see. Trish is the teacher. Debbie likes books. Allison is a secret smoker. Cheryl blinks periodically. Samantha is a bitch. Amy, Carrie, and Toby probably have personalities, but the film doesn’t care to mention them. I’m probably missing two or three of the other girls, but who gives a shit? They’re all taking part in a “stay awake”, which I guess is like a lock-in. Someone mentions it is organized to raise funds for the school, but how exactly?
Do you want to know what these girls will be doing during this stay awake? Well, they’ll sit on the gym floor and watch a movie. Twice. They’ll play volleyball. They’ll have a group shower during which no one will show a single nipple. Then they’ll sit on the gym floor some more. Someone will say, “I ate too many potato chips”, which is the most insight into the psyche of a character we will get during the entire 90-minute runtime. At no point during any of this will anyone turn a single fucking light on. I’m fairly certain this entire production takes place in one-third of a gymnasium, two hallways, and a bathroom.
At some point, Allison’s boyfriend and a couple of his friends hop the fence and break in. The old man skulks around with a shotgun before having his heart popped out of his chest. The ghost finally starts murdering people, but damn near all of it is offscreen. The closest this film gets to creativity is having Amy chased by a possessed firehose. The director films the entire scene from the hose’s POV. Brilliant stuff. 45% of the running time is devoted to POV shots, most of them looking at the ladies from behind the same potted plant in the same hallway. Every attack on the girls ends the same way. The camera moves towards them. They scream or look confused. We cut to something else.
That’s because none of the girls are being killed. They’re instead being possessed by, what I assume, is the only ghost in the movie. Quite a feat, being able to possess not only a half dozen girls but also firehoses, doors, desks, and telephones. Oh, and to do all that while also being able to manifest in reality as a giant, bug-eyed rubber monster. The most frightening scene in the movie is when the ghost says, “This is just the beginning”, and I panicked, thinking the movie was going to go on for another two hours. This leads to my favorite scene in the film. Trish and three surviving students run out of the school. They approach a parked car, but quickly realize they don’t have the keys. So they run back inside, then back outside, and then get into the car. The car doesn’t start, so they run back inside. Riveting.
I will fully and freely admit that I watched the final ten minutes of this abomination at 2X speed. How does it end? Well, the teacher kills the ghost with a chemical reaction and a big ass fire. You know, as you do when fighting a ghost. The school begins to burn to the ground while Trish and the three students stand outside, triumphant but dangerously close to a gigantic fucking blaze. What happens to the possessed girls still inside the school? I guess they burned alive. I don’t know and I don’t care. I would have paid good money to be burned alive by the end of this goddamn abortion.
So let’s take a moment and seriously consider whether there is anything redeeming about THE STAY AWAKE, a tiny nugget of something buried in this heap of cinematic scat?
Absolutely not. The acting is atrocious, the dubbing sounds like one woman doing nine different voices, the sound design is obnoxious, and none of the kills are satisfying. The best I can say is that the film is competently edited. The shots match. That’s the best I can say. That’s the only positive I can find. What else could I possibly think is a positive here? It didn’t show me footage of war crimes. Is that a positive? It didn’t dig up my dead mother or anally violate my father. It didn’t raise my taxes or change my search engine to Bing. I guess I should be grateful. It could have been worse, right?
RIGHT?!
I consider myself a connoisseur of 80s slop horror, but this pushed me to my absolute limits. I was fed up by the 20-minute mark and outright hostile by the midpoint. I wanted this movie done. I wanted it dead. I wanted its family dead. I wanted its house burned to the ground. I wanted to go there in the middle of the night and piss on its ashes. I wanted to watch a good movie, like THE UNTOUCHABLES, and that’s not what THE STAY AWAKE is. No nononono nono no no nono no no this is one of the worst films ever made. Someone go dig up Ed Wood and tell him he's off the hook. His spot as the worst filmmaker has been taken. He looks like Scorsese standing next to this shit.