Don't Go To Sleep (1982) is a very hard movie to get a hold of. There is no DVD release yet for this movie, but there are copies floating around the internet. This was a made for TV movie and let me tell you, this scared the crap out of me back in the day. What a creepy ass movie this was.
The movie is about a family of four, the parents and their two children, who move into a new home and try to start their life over after the death of their oldest daughter Jennifer, which resulted from a freak car explosion. The two other young kids, who happened to survive the car explosion, are Mary and her brother Kevin. The house that the family moved into belongs to Bernice, which is Mary and Kevin's grandmother. Everything seems fine at first but the terror begins when Mary starts hearing her deceased sister Jennifer calling for her from underneath the bed. Of course it turns out that Mary's parents don't believe her and they even blame her younger brother Kevin for scaring Mary. Little did they know that Kevin was indeed an innocent bystander and the voices that Mary was hearing might actually really be coming from her dead sister Jennifer.
Things get even worse from here and the ghost of Jennifer now actually becomes visible to Mary. Jennifer's ghost becomes Mary's new playmate, and there's nothing or nobody that will stand in their way because Mary will make sure of that. After a few days of hanging out with her deceased sister, Jennifer tells Mary of a new plan that she has. She tells Mary that she must kill her family off one by one, or else they can no longer be together. Mary, scared to loose her older sister again, decides that this plan might just be a good idea and from here on is where things start becoming very deadly. Mary's family start slowly dropping like flies, but in the beginning it's not really visible to who is really killing them. And here's where the question lies...is Mary the one actually killing her family off one by one, or is it really the ghost of her dead sister Jennifer?
This movie was very eerie. There is no violence or anything like that, being that it was a made for TV movie, but the things that they suggested I'm surprised that they got away with that much. The acting isn't the greatest, but what do you expect from a made for TV horror movie? It was good enough for what it was and it never gets too unbearably cheesy. The voices that came from underneath Mary's bed were scary as hell, and Jennifer's ghost was truly spine tingling. The story was also very well told, and what's even creepiest out of the whole thing was the ending that left me sleeping with the lights on (of course I was younger at the time), but it still packs a punch.
This movie is very hard to find and as I said it isn't officially released on DVD yet. If you really want to see this movie just look around for a copy on the internet, but good luck finding it. The only reason why I have it is because I bought a copy from a horror convention, and luckily it was very good quality. Anyways, you should really try to see this movie.
It surprises me this is called a Horror Movie, because it wasn't scary at all. The scenes that were supposed to be scary dragged on forever, the camera showing what was going to happen and cutting as soon as the person is going to die what the camera shows you what they are dying of. The movie was so unbelievably slow, I was longing forward to it ending! The story was terrible. The acting was bad, except for Dennis Weaver, he was terrible.
MCT:May 10, 2008
MCT:December 12, 2007
