Dead Awake

So first i gotta complement Jocelin Donahue ,, she did well in the beginning of the movie doing the two sisters roles ,, but the movie plot was just bad ,, the script was slow for a Horror/Thriller genre ,, watched it on my laptop "thankfully" so i kept on speeding up to see the good part till i found myself in the credits :D

The cast was okay ,, i watched Jesse Bradford before "in a comedy" :D so this was weird ,, Jesse Borrego "Dr. Hassan" was just not sensible to be a psychiatric , and even Lori Petty "Dr. Sykes" was so obvious and not engaging .

My advice find some other movie to watch ,, Not recommended.

Uh oh! A scary ghost is slowly spreading through a group of friends and picking them off one by one! But this time it involves sleep paralysis so this time it's different, right? RIGHT?

It's kind of like a really slow-paced, watered down version of The Ring. The ghost isn't particularly scary once you actually see what she looks like, which happens pretty early on. Death scenes are uninteresting and repetitive. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that a movie can't be a good horror without buckets of blood, but for that to work there needs to be tension and suspense, and there's none to be seen here. Most of the movie just consists of the characters standing around talking about the ghost and trying to convince various people that it exists.

Sorry to anyone who actually likes this, but basically this is a horror-lite movie for people who don't actually like horror movies. That's the only crowd I can imagine enjoying this. It's not scary, it's not thrilling, and it's not interesting. It's an absolute waste of a great concept that maybe someone better can try again someday.

It's predictable. It's full of clichés, and you'll see every death coming in advance. Still, the concept is pretty good. The thought of some evil force attacking you as you sleep, sounds like another famous, far better, horror movie. The monster was more subtle in appearance than Freddy Krueger. She was basically a much older version of The Ring girl. The director clearly drew inspiration from The Ring and told the actress, "You remember The Ring? Yeah, Crawl on the floor toward the camera like that!"

Plot

A young woman must save herself and her friends from an ancient evil that stalks its victims through the real-life phenomenon of sleep paralysis.

Cast

Jesse "What happened to his career Bradford and the always delightful Lori Petty star.

Verdict

The very concept of sleep paralysis is horrifying but how does it translate into a horror movie? Well, not very well at all.

You see part of me actually wanted to like it, the execution was actually fairly decent here but what they were executing was lacklustre at best.

Our antagonist looked pretty poor, the sleep sequences used a very oversaturated filter, the characters were rather wooden and as much as I wanted to be engaged I found the movie rather pushing me away.

Dead Awake is not a bad film, it's just a film with no real identity, that failed to impress and perhaps could have used a stronger leading lady.

Rants

The cover features an image with a spider, no spoilers here but that is in fact a scene in the movie and though I have no arachnophobia I have to say that was the one single scene that got any kind of reaction out of me. You ever seen the meme with the guy counting numbers with a sombre looking on his face until he reaches 69 then he has a slight smile then returns to sombre with number 70 and beyond? That was me with this film and that scene, a glimmer, a moment of reaction and then back to the ho-hum.

The Good

Lori Petty A couple of interesting ideas

The Bad

Lead could have been better Predictable Filter/Antagonist were distractingly weak.

As someone who has experienced sleep paralysis countless times, I can say the ordeal is extremely terrifying. The concept & real life experiences could have made this a very decent movie, but it completely missed the mark. This movie doesn't even deserve one star, but I that's the lowest I could rate it. I wasn't expecting one of the greatest movies ever made, but I at least thought I would have a jump moment, feel tension, anything. I just found myself checking to see how much time was left.