★ 5 / 10
House Idea, a kind of retail superstore similar
Chris Sawin
House Idea, a kind of retail superstore similar to Costco or IKEA, is targeted by six young activists to protest the animal cruelty in making the furniture…
House Idea, a kind of retail superstore similar to Costco or IKEA, is targeted by six young activists to protest the animal cruelty in making the furniture sold in their store. They enter the store right before closing, hide until all the doors are locked and the customers are sent home, and then trash the place with animal blood and spray paint.
Kevin (Turlough Convery) is a security guard recently put on the night shift with his brother Jack (Aidan O’Hare). Kevin nearly lost his job after losing his temper with unruly customers. The night shift is his last chance to prove he doesn’t deserve to be fired.
After discovering the vandalism the activists left behind, Kevin and Jack confront them. However, a brutal accident sends Kevin over the edge. With Kevin no longer worried about losing his job, he begins hunting the activists and killing them one by one. Their only chance is to try and survive until the store opens in the morning.
From Canadian directors Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell also known as RKSS (Turbo Kid, Summer of ’84, We Are Zombies), Wake Up feels like a drama strewn together by a few moments of horror.
The film focuses more on Kevin struggling to keep his job while Jack succumbs to his vices while trying to keep Kevin in check. It also devotes an unbelievable amount of time to the activists destroying the store. The problem is they’re all stupid, boring, and forgettable.
Wake Up was written by Alberto Marini based on an original idea by Martin Soudan, but the problem is none of these activists have any depth. Some of them want to screw each other and many of them come from wealthy families, but they mostly come off as intolerable brats.
During their mission, even after the film you don’t know what they were trying to do besides trash everything, you’d think they’d try to be somewhat stealthy. Ideally, you would try to get in, vandalize to your heart’s content, and get out before anyone notices. These a-holes stop 20 minutes into the movie to have a damn food fight. Ethan (Benny O. Arther), the supposed activist leader, then says something along the lines of it’s okay to have fun while accomplishing the mission.
One of the female activists eventually slaps on a pair of rollerblades and their last hurrah is a paintball fight. It all feels like some backward heist planned out by a 13-year-old.
Even after Kevin starts killing the activists, Wake Up never really introduces any clever kills or adds any sort of tension to these young kids being hunted. There’s a moment in the bathroom where Karim (Tom Gould) is hiding from him in one of the stalls. Karim leaves his shoes in the stall for no reason, crawls under three stalls, and then gets a handmade spear javelin thrown into his back.
Most of the kills involve a knife stabbing someone in a predictable spot; the back, the gut, or the eye. Someone is slammed against a wall repeatedly until they just die. Somebody else gets choked. One dude gets stabbed and then his neck is broken. Every death feels run of the mill.
The most creative part of the film is when the remaining survivors are lured into a freezer to retrieve a wounded friend they thought was dead. When they arrive, neon paint is dumped on them and the lights go out. They’re then hunted by Kevin unable to see, but the audience sees everything because the paint has a black light effect.
The ending isn’t super satisfying either. None of the characters are likable, but even then the direction they go in is questionable. The final sequence is also bizarre like it was only done to make the filmmakers laugh.
Turbo Kid is an incredibly fun film, but RKSS has never really been able to make anything as good or as decent since. Wake Up could have been a ton of fun if the kills weren’t so dull and if the characters weren’t strictly one-layered assholes. Everything feels halfway developed here; the beginning of something worthwhile with a middle and end involving no imagination or creativity whatsoever.
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★ 6 / 10
ma-cortes
An entertaing and gory low-budget film with large doses of scares, gory scenes and terrifying set pieces . Ordinary slasher flick from Canada including…
An entertaing and gory low-budget film with large doses of scares, gory scenes and terrifying set pieces . Ordinary slasher flick from Canada including coproduction by France/Spain, containing a lot of grisly killings and unknown cast at a mall. In an attempt to draw attention to the environmental crisis, young activists (Benny O. Arthur, Jacqueline Moré, Tom Gould, Alessia Yoko Fontana, Kyle Scudder, Charlotte Stoibe) decide to invade and vandalize a furniture store called . Then things go wrong, the protest quickly turns into a massacre when they find themselves trapped with a hunting-obsessed night guard. A merciless , brutal killer goes bersek, terrorizing the group of friends. . Fun getting in !. Hell getting out !. Terror never felt so real !. The night of dreams quickly turns into a true nightmare !.A bone-chilling and gory horror flick with a devasting and threatening series killer executing astonishing crimes. The Canadian film-making trio RKSS behind the cult classic Turbo Kid direct this crazy, ultraviolent survival slasher, presented at the 2023 Sitges Film Festival. It stars a group of environmental friends, environmental activists who raid House Idea, a furniture shopping centre, at night to protest the deforestation of the rainforest. What they don't expect, however, is to run into a psychopathic and bloodthirsty security guard who loves primitive art and is eager to play cat and mouse. An out-of-control villain, hunters being hunted, and lots of blood and gore are the keys to this film, which produces more tension than trying to put a wardrobe together piece by piece.The premise of the film is as macabre as it is simple: a foolish group of young people enter a shopping mall resulting in terrible consequences. The Thrill is the relentless hunt carried put by a heinous and sinister hunter/murderer against some unfortunate trespassers. The chilling plot is simple and plain, an ordinary screenplay of hundreds of Slashers , a serial murderer turns a mall into his own personal playground, and the essential twisted issue results to be that the killer on the loose undertakes a criminal spree while the victims flee desperately. A typical criminal spree in which some teenagers begin a night in which fun turns into a nightmare when they realize that they are relentlessly pursued .Wake Up(2023) follows the style of the recent Karusell (2023) by Simon Sandquist , ¨Hell Fest¨ (2018) by Gregory Plotkin and ¨Haunt¨ (2019) by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods ,also dealing with a psycho-killer going bersek at in a public and closed establishment, in these cases amusement parks. Al the same time, all of them bear remarkable resemblance to the classic ¨Tobe Hooper's The Funhouse (1981)¨ about four teenagers spending a night at a carnival funhose, who become next on the list of victims.It contains dark and sinister cinematography, in fact the camera often assumes a pointedly aggressive stance, as well as screeching and eerie musical score by Arnau Bataller . This short-budget film was made by directors François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell (RKSS) . They direct professionally but nothing special this disturbing survival story full of horrror, chiller and chases inside a mall. They're working interchangeably for television or cinema. Their debut feature was ¨Turbo Kid¨ it is a post-apocalyptic film made in 2015, an anti-prophetic story with a lot of gore, which adds an eighties science fiction aesthetic and shows a past that has not come to fruition. Rating: average 5/10. The flick will appeal to horror fans, although we had already seen the plot and the situations portrayed before and better filmed .
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★ 5 / 10
Ikea slasher, not a good one.
deloudelouvain
If you just went to the Ikea store and you feel you still didn't get enough of it you can give this movie a go as it looks like it's been shot there. I guess…
If you just went to the Ikea store and you feel you still didn't get enough of it you can give this movie a go as it looks like it's been shot there. I guess they had to remove all Björks and Knutts to replace them by something similar, but it's clearly inspired by the Ikea franchise. Nothing wrong with that if it was a good movie, which it isn't by the way, unless you don't mind a guy getting his head bashed in, losing liters of blood and apparently not being dead as he pops up a bit later in the story without a single drop of blood spatter. Or another kid getting speared by a kitchen knife in the spine but still able to walk around like nothing happened. It's just too ridiculous for me. A bit of slashing, I can live with that, even enjoy it, but dead is dead to me, so when they are still functioning normally after being slashed I'm losing interest.
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69%
TOMATOMETER
· 26 reviews
69%
AUDIENCE
· 50 ratings
5.4/10
2.4K
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720p or 1080p expected when?