if I die before I wake
***/**** Image C+ Sound C
starring Stephanie Jones, Muse Watson, Michael McCleery, Coryanne Sennett
written and directed by Brian Katkin
by Bill Chambers If I Die Before I Wake is not a guilty pleasure (and definitely not a pleasure, period), but it did provoke a very guilty reaction from me: one of admiration. Other critics have dismissed it outright, calling it cheap, classist, exploitative, even sick. Guess what? It is all of those things, yet I found the film to be an efficient button-pusher with impressively acute access to our emotions, and there is combustible tension in our heroine's plight that had me practically praying aloud for her safety. If I Die Before I Wake, unlike so much of modern schlock (believe me, I've seen my quota), is panic-inducing, which isn't nothing.
One could compare the film to umpteen home-invasion movies, including Straw Dogs and both versions of The Desperate Hours, from which it appears to borrow the basic elements of an upper-middle-class family, a nook-and-cranny-filled dwelling, and some unwelcome, violent intruders. But If I Die Before I Wake (only the "I"'s are capitalized in the onscreen title) is most like an extendamix of the terrifying video Henry and Otis shoot in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, sans–barely–necrophilia. If that ain't a word of caution, I don't know what is. I digress…
In a dialogue-free, DePalma-esque opening sequence mixing POV shots and more indirectly voyeuristic tracking shots, debuting writer-director Brian Katkin (an editor by trade, which shows in his rhythmic cutting) establishes Mom, Dad, and the kids–web-surfing Ben, who unwisely blots out the world with a pair of headphones, and two disparately-aged girls: high-school student Lori Beth (Stephanie Jones), and Mary, who bears an eerie, if useful, resemblance to Jon Benet Ramsey. Very young Coryanne Sennett is, for what it's worth, astonishingly good in the role. The camera, having mapped out both the family unit and a rough geography of the house, eventually winds up back at the front entrance. Someone with a nylon pulled over his face breaks the door down. "We're in," he says to the other two burglars.
Artisan DVD's tagline for If I Die Before I Wake–"Don't ever forget to lock your doors!"–is thus misleading. These people did lock their door. By intercutting most of the family sleeping with this violent breaking and entering, the house becomes sacrosanct, and the intrusion more disturbing; of the film's rape scenes, this is the first and arguably most unambiguous of them. I thought of how Die Hard's Nakatomi Plaza is often compared to a womb–and Jones's Lori Beth, it should be said, is more of a John McClane than your average Final Girl. She's outwitting these terrorists from the jump, not waiting for the climax to kick her ass in gear. Trying in vain to contact the proper authorities, blindsiding the unsuspecting killers with her quick-wittedness (it's not that she's precociously intelligent, it's that she can think through and past her fear), and retreating to the chimney, Lori Beth even wears a McClane-style muscle shirt, an admittedly titillating costume choice wisely offset by pyjama bottoms. All this to protect little sis–the rest of her kin is soon a lost cause, anyway.
Aye, there's the rub: the film is a rape drama to the nth degree. By its finish (actually, by a few minutes in), I felt both violated and vaguely complicit. The grime that collects on Lori Beth mirrors the psychic residue of If I Die Before I Wake. This is the sort of film in which the only bad guy in moral turmoil (Michael McCleery) keeps Mary hidden from his putrid brother (I Know What You Did Last Summer's Captain Hell-liner himself, Muse Watson, the hinge of the DVD's marketing campaign) by locking her in the refrigerator.
There's even a scene that directly recalls–in spirit, if not content–said camcorder footage from Henry: Mary, revealing the desperate ingenuity of children, distracts the killers by popping a vacation video into the VCR. As Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 5 swells on the soundtrack, the images of our beleaguered brood in happier times play like pornography in their emotional manipulativeness. As our long-haired villains in vagrant chic watch with scientific fascination these suburbanites having their day at the beach, it feels fear-mongering in a way that's maybe valid but isn't productive. If I Die Before I Wake preys on our baser feelings. That's why it works, for better or worse.
THE DVD
Artisan's disc is nothing special, but neither is it a total wash. The full-frame (1.33:1) transfer appears to have a 16mm print source, for there is excessive grain and not a lot of shadow detail. (The film is dark in every sense of the word.) The English Dolby Surround sound–listed in the closing credits as "Surround Sound," meaning some friend of Katkin's with ProTools probably mixed this–is hardly dynamic. The effects themselves make a stronger impression than their directionality. Occasional post-synch dialogue is obvious from mismatched lip movements. Animated menus also offer access to slim biographies and four trailers (for Premonition, Bloody Murder, The Crimson Code, and Eastside), complete with full-motion sub-menu previews. Incidentally, while labelled a 2001 release on the cover art (and 1998 at various Internet locales), If I Die Before I Wake carries a copyright date of 1996 in the end titles. It doesn't seem to have received a conventional theatrical release, so that's what we'll go with here.
77 minutes; R; 1.33:1; English Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Artisan
