shazbat69 ..... I played the dead nurse at the beginning of this film LOL. It was a long long time ago but it was fun to be involved in :) I never actually saw the full film until recently, so I don't think I will be recommending it to my kids! "The acting is terrible; it's so bad that even the accent of the main actresses is horrible. The situations are slow and boring. There's little action in the movie but it's so cheesy that you can't tell if it's intended to be funny. The demon is laughable! those red eyes are pathetic. The serial killer ghost suddenly appears and tells things about darkness and it's power."I agree with the rest of the reviews too - rubbish!But it's nice to see yourself on film, even if it's just as a body half buried in the bushes LOL.

Wizard-8 Before Nu Image made a name for itself by making and distributing high-quality straight-to-video movies, they were known for making and distributing junk like this. "Stay Awake" may not be the worst horror movie, but it would probably be high on a list of the most BORING movies. After the execution scene at the beginning of the movie (supposedly taking place in America, though you see South African license plates), just about nothing of real consequence happens for the next forty or so minutes! And what does eventually happen is not worth the wait, with slaughter sequences that are tame in gore and blood, and directed with as little passion as you can imagine. There isn't even any gratuitous nudity! The characters are thin and all alike in nature, and there are a bunch of unanswered questions like how the spirit of an executed serial killer could cross an ocean - and WHY he would do this. There is no possible reason to seek out and watch this movie.

FieCrier I didn't find this to be nearly as bad as others have, but it isn't very good either, and certainly needn't be sought out to be watched.It starts well. Somewhere in America, a killer is being walked down a very white hallway, down a red carpet, to an execution chamber. This is intercut with the crime scenes of the various women he has killed. This prologue was nicely done, I thought. The killer makes threats to return to kill more women, to kill these people's children, and he claims to be the angel of darkness and speaks in a demonic voice.Nineteen years later, inexplicably somewhere in Europe, a group of young women are staying overnight at a girl's school doing a "stay awake" to raise funds. The killer shows up, first apparently as a poltergeist. We see shots from his POV, drifting into the school, through the hallways, as chairs move around, a picture falls from a wall, etc. This is intercut with the women doing aerobics in the gym. This scene goes on for some time. Some young men show up at the school to try to scare the women, and to hook up with them.It's quite a while before the killer strikes, about fifty minutes, I think. He appears both as a sort of cross between Gozilla and a giant rat with glowing red eyes and a whip-like tongue, and as himself with glowing red eyes. As the former, it's pretty silly-looking; as the latter, he's fairly creepy looking.There were some scenes I liked. One I recall: the women are scared by a gorilla mask which is thrown in front of them. They laugh at their fears, but when one of them picks it up she finds it to be heavier than it should be....The voices do seem to be strangely dubbed. As far as I could tell, the actresses were speaking English, but at least a few of the voices don't seem like they would belong to the actresses. The young women's characters aren't well differentiated from each other, nor are the young men. Frankly, it's hard to tell most of them apart even visually.

Rish Outfield 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.