I have to admit, the crop of movies that have been coming out of the Halloween Horror Nights festival’s short film contest have been pretty impressive so far. Short films often have a tough row to hoe in that they don’t really have time to crank up the scares, but these have done nicely.
Today we’re checking on If I Die Before I Wake, another 2008 entrant. Will it keep up the hot streak?
The answer here, sadly, is no. This is the first bad one I’ve seen in the series, and there’s a good reason. It’s incomprehensible. While it starts out interesting, as a man undergoes a series of violent dreams, or possibly hallucinations, the cause behind them all is what’ll get your dander up, especially if you’re into coherent narratives as much as I am.
Seriously, not one iota of this makes any sense. By the time I got to the ending I was so abjectly butt-lost that it didn’t even matter any more.
Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale spits my ire at this incomprehensible sludge pile by handing it a two out of ten. It’s a confused mishmash of images with no overarching theme to hold it all together, and the ending is just the runny icing on this pudding of a cake of horrendous filmmaking.
Popularity: unranked [?]
