'Sleep. Walk. Kill.' occupies a strange place in my opinion. There are plenty of low budget horror films on various online streaming platforms and many of them are so bad that I turn them off and don't bother even trying to review them. However, I watched this one all the way to the end, so there must have been something there that was interesting or entertaining. It's just there seemed to be so many flaws in it.
It's about a strange loud noise that echos out across America, making anyone who falls asleep a mindless killer. One lovable loser has to try and keep his family together while holding out against the source of this supernatural event. It's a horror comedy in a (very!) similar style to the classic 'Shaun of the Dead.'
What I'm going to do next is basically tear into the film like it's the worst movie ever made, yet it's not. First of all, when I say 'low budget' I really mean it. The gore is just about passable, but the acting is terrible. Yes, I know we've all seen a bad actor or two pop up in a film and yet here pretty much everyone seems to be reading their lines off a cue-card just off screen.
Then we have the direction itself. It's like half the shots you can almost tell that the actors were simply standing there waiting for the director to shout 'Action!' and then start performing accordingly. The edits are sometimes jarring, especially when there's a scene that they clearly didn't have the budget/skill to film, so they just sort of use the loosest of camera tricks (maybe cut away from the action and only return to the aftermath) and hope that the audience doesn't notice.
Now, I don't know whether this was something to do with the streaming site or even my TV that I watched the film on (if so, please ignore this criticism), but the audio was all over the place. It was like you needed to turn the volume way up to hear the characters speak, but then when some music was played over any dramatic part, it blares out at you and you have to quickly hit the 'volume down' button on your remote.
So, there you have it - many reasons not to like it. But I stuck with it. And, I think that the reason I did (besides seeing if there was an eventual explanation for the supernatural happening) was that the dialogue was actually quite funny. Sure, the characters were hardly developed, but there were more than a few times when I let out a genuine chuckle or two. So, set your expectations low and you might find something at least entertainingly watchable for an hour and a half.
