The Stay Awake (1987)

 

 

The Stay Awake (1987)

directed by:  John Bernard

starring:  Shirley Jane Harris, Tanya Gordon, Jayne Hutton, Heath Porter, Ken Marshall, Michelle Carry, Lindsey Reardon, Christobel D'Orthez, Maxine John, Pierre Jacobs

Format:  Personal VHS Collection

Tagline:  When Night Turns To Nightmare

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(out of 5)

     Recently I've felt the need to go through my old VHS collection.  I still have over 200 and sometimes I just get the itch for the grainy, lines through the screen, and/or foggy look of VHS tapes.  I am not one of these "VHS is great and classic" people whom I will never understand but I'm sure all the cloud/download people say the same for me and my DVDs/Blu-Rays.  I mean for me you have to have some sort of purchased physical copy or you own nothing.  But that's a subject for a separate time. 

 The Stay Awake was pretty bad I mean it had good intentions and could have been so much better had some of the writing been better.  There was just too much left out.  We have an evil rapist/serial killer who is gassed at the beginning of the film for raping and murdering a number of young women.  While he is being placed in the gas chamber we are shown a number of these dead women as flashbacks I'm assuming coming from the head of our killer.  Of course he begins to protest his death in the normal fashion of making evil threats before he's gassed.

     And cut to this Catholic School for Girls on a night where a small group of young ladies are staying awake all night to raise money for some great cause.  The writing and most especially the dialogue for this 80s piece of crap was atrocious beginning to end.  But it for me is one of those bad movies you just keep right on watching and can't figure out why. 
     The story jumps around there really is no reason why the killer chose this Catholic School for Girls to haunt and kill but the body count begins rising and our killer has a few different forms from his own body and glowing red eyes, to a green slimy rat monster(this is never explained), to a scurrying lizard across the floor (this is also not explained).  I love mystery in a movie but come on you have to have some background reason as to why this killer is coming back and turning into various creatures.  Towards the end the girls begin to fight back with some real bad acting and silly one-liners so all in all I would say stay away unless you want a bad 80s movie to go along with a bad movie night which is the only reason I rewatched this.