I Woke Up Early the Day I Died (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com/ Member: Online Film Critics Society
*1/2 out of four
Starring Billy Zane. Rated R.
You don't look at a René Magritte painting and search for a deeper meaning. You likewise don't look at one for 88 minutes straight. Surrealist works are notable for their quirks, and they are fun, but looking at one quirk for an hour and a half is exhausting. That was my experience with I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, a surrealistic, hyperactive comedy with no dialogue. It's not a silent movie; there is lots of atmospheric music, occasional screams and weird sound effects, but nobody ever utters an audible word. Though the film is distinctive, its unique style wore thin after about 20 minutes, and as it progressed, watching became a chore.
The only reason the script ever got filmed is because it was written by the pseudo-legendary Ed Wood, the man behind such "classics" as Plan 9 >From Outer Space and Night of the Ghouls. The joke, of course, is that his films are so bad, they're good; so humorous in their inanity that they become hits. I Woke Up Early the Day I Died, unfortunatly, is so bad that it's really bad. It stars Billy Zane (Titanic) as a dangerous lunatic who overpowers a nurse, escapes from a mental hospital and proceeds to wonder around, stealing a car, clothes, and a load of money.
Our thief reaches a cemetery, where he witnesses a bizarre ritual. He falls asleep and finds himself, literally, in a hole, with his money gone. For whatever reason, he is bent on getting his hard-unearned cash back (considering how easily he stole it the first time, why didn't he just go steal some more?). He comes upon a list of the people who were at the mysterious ceremony and commences to seek out each of them and kill them if they don't have what he is looking for.
I don't think either director Aris Iliopulos nor Ed Wood realized that this would have made a glorious 20 minute short. The subject and the style seem to have been made for it. Unfortunately, twenty minutes worth of material is stretched out to more than four times that length, and the film simply overstays its already dubious welcome. It grabbed my attention in the beginning and gradually lost it as it went on, up to the point where halfway through I was already weary. It might seem odd that a film as furiously paced as this one can be so tedious; but the surprise will wear off when you consider how repetitive it is.
I Woke Up Early the Day I Died is a comedy, I guess, though it could have fooled me. Unlike most Ed Wood films, this one tries to be funny and fails, instead of the other way around. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, in fact, I think it would only make sense for someone who has been so "good" at making unintentional comedies to take a stab at a real one. Whether Wood actually went for comedy in his script we'll never know, but in either case, this is a failure.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Christina Ricci, Summer Phoenix, John Ritter and others show up for short and pointless cameos. Ricci, for example, plays a prostitute. Her role consists of dancing around with Zane in his motel room and then being thrown out. Thomas is an astonished onlooker as a woman gets thrown off a cliff. Was the Home Improvement teen heartthrob really that desperate for work? Zane, meanwhile, occupies himself by making weird faces at the camera when he is not called upon to run around wildly and beat people up. Lack of dialogue makes him the ultimate caricature.
The carnival side-show climax manages to demonstrate everything that is wrong with this no-budget production. It's desperately unfunny, but thinks it's the funniest thing since Plan 9;, it's so spontaneously surrealistic it makes your head spin all while being confusing enough to make your head spin twice as fast in the other direction. I hope another film is made from an Ed Wood screenplay for I Woke Up Early the Day I Died is not a fitting send-off. ©1999 Eugene Novikov ‰
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