Best movie of this year hands down!

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

An executed serial killer returns from the dead to continue his murder spree as an indestructible spiritual entity. Hmm, where have we seen that highly imaginative concept before? Oh yeah, I remember now, in about a dozen of other contemporary horror movies like "Shocker", "The Chair", "Prison" and "House 3". All these movies may be slightly more famous, but "The Stay Awake" got released a little bit sooner so I can't really claim it's a rip-off or something. What I can righteously claim, however, is that this is a dull and utterly senseless turkey that deserves to be unknown and remain that way. The killer, John Brown, died in an American gas chamber in 1967 but inexplicably returns in 1987 and takes possession of a European girls' school during a night when a teacher organizes a stay-awake (some kind of charity pajamas-party in the gym) with eight of her students. That sick bastard chose his time and location to reincarnate suspiciously well, it seems… Early in the film there's a scene where the girls play a prank on their teacher and all pretend to be dead. I wish that were true and the film would then be over and done with, specifically since only sheer boredom, ineptitude and horrible acting performances ensue further after that. The presence of the supernatural killer is indicated through unsteady camera movements and cheesy wannabe ominous music, but nothing really interesting happens for a very, very long time. In fact, this might easily be the tamest and most frustratingly uneventful of ALL 80's slashers. The obligatory group shower sequence doesn't show any of the good stuff and the whole damn thing is virtually gore-free. Seriously, how is it possible that, by the year 1987, filmmakers still hadn't figured out that making a stalk & slash movie without gore and/or nudity is completely pointless? Nobody likes movies with invisible killers and it's even more irritating when the culprit eventually turns out to be a tacky demon-like monster with flashy red eyeballs and laughable horns. What the hell were they thinking?!?

Nauseatingly awful film that begins with a serial girl killer being executed in 1969 somewhere in America. As he is being primed for the gas chamber, he rants over and over again that he is the prince of darkness and cannot die. The film then forwards to 19 years later somewhere in Europe at an all girl's school. From here we see a bunch of pretty yet untalented girls and their teacher do aerobics, watch a movie and eat potato crisps, smoke cigarettes, and play scary games on each other. All the while the spirit of the killer seen in the exposition piece comes to this place 19 years later and for some weird, inexplicable reason to Europe of all places. This movie sucks bad and in a big way. Why does this spirit come here and 19 years later? Why is he back as a real cheap looking demon costume - like he just lost the lead for a baby Godzilla commercial or something? And perhaps my biggest question: how do you make money holding a stay awake? Anyway, you can guess....well, not really but you get the general idea, what happens. People die and there is a fight of the teacher(wearing a crucifix) against the rubber menace. In one scene, knowing she is only being protected by the crucifix, she lays it on a table. Why would she do that? Nothing later shows it to be a good move. Ultimately, The Stay Awake is a very tiring, boring movie with almost no merit at all. Nothing exciting happens. The script is riddled with question marks and bad scenes. The direction is trite. The acting very poor. The setting of the school is impressive at the very...and I mean very...least. All the girls are quite fetching, but you don't get to see anything so the movie doesn't deliver at any level. there is absolutely no way I can believe this had any theatrical release of any kind. It must be one of those direct-to-video movies so popular in the 1980s.

There are so many things wrong with this film that it's difficult to know where to begin. It almost seems that the voices were dubbed because they seem out of sync almost always. I'm left wondering if this was a foreign film or what exactly! The beginning of this movie starts with the execution of a murderer/rapist, and it's horribly funny what he says right before they gas him in the chamber. The first hour of the movie is really slow and boring and doesn't do anything to advance the plot. It never even remotely answers why the guy was executed in "1969" and suddenly comes back to life as a "ghost killer" in "1988". What the hell kind of dinky story is that? Even for a super-low budget movie that's just inexcusable. The last half hour of the movie is mildly decent, but the monster is one of the most pathetic things I've yet to see in any low budget horror picture...can we say it looks like a cheap Halloween suit bought at Wal-Mart??? Because that's about what it looks like...it's so horrible that it's funny beyond words. Also, you'd think with a couple of the attractive actresses in the movie that they would have inserted some gratuitous nudity scenes to at least keep certain audiences entertained. What does it do though...a shower scene with very partial nudity?? I think this was most likely the film maker's first project (and hopefully their last). Unless you just have to see every bad horror film ever made take my advice and avoid this one. Although it might not be bad if you want to see a movie that literally fails in every area.

This movie had definite potential: a large group of nubile young girls are stalked in a locked-up Catholic School by an evil, unstoppable force. I'll bet there's even a good movie in that premise. But "The Stay Awake" was not it. Overly European, some of the poorly-dubbed dialogue didn't even sound the right gender. It moved slowly at first, then ground to a screeching halt that continued almost until the end. Who really needs ten minutes of Camera-As-Killer roaming the halls, looking for victims, yet finding nothing? Time after time, the unseen killer would lurk, follow, and approach one of the girls, only to be gone when genuine tension was right around the corner. And when he finally started to kill, it made less sense than "Basic Instinct" on the Superstation. When at last we saw the killer's face, it was some poorly-made body suit with a plastic rat's head with bulbous red eyes. Why? That's not scary. There was never any explanation as to the killer's motives, or why he came back, or why he would be attacking people in Europe (though the supposedly-American prologue took place in no America I've ever seen--obviously the same un-named and nondescript European locale the rest of the film took place in). The only highpoint was how genuinely attractive some of these girls were, sparking hope that we'd get some cool interaction, real character development, or at least a good shower scene. Well, when they hit the showers, the scene immediately cut to what was going on elsewhere, as if this were a made-for-television movie somewhere and nobody told us. Lack of nudity aside, none of these girls (except the one dubbed by a man) ever seemed to be an individual (just "Girl 1," "Girl 3," "Supposedly Fat Girl But Isn't", etc.) and I cared about none of them. All for the best, since the film ended abruptly and unexpectedly, with (SPOILER?) the 'all-powerful' killer easily defeated. I feel I've wasted a lot of words and time describing this dull, not-entertaining failure of a movie. Don't waste yours.