Dead Before They Wake (2025)

Recently, filmmaker and actor Nathan Shepka reached out to see if I'd review his latest release, which I was more than happy to do. We've seen two other of his films here on the site, When Darkness Falls and Lock & Load, both vastly different movies, but both very enjoyable. Let's see how this one did.

Dead Before They Wake has Shepka as Alex, a lonely nightclub bouncer whose only companionship is his father, who's close to passing and living in a rest home; and Gemma, a teacher who makes extra cash as a sex worker. All that changes when a lawyer representing a government official asks Alex to rescue a young deaf girl who's being held by some traffickers that have been taking young girls in the city that live in vulnerable situations. The £20,000 he's offered for the job is nice, but really he wants to do the right thing, so he agrees to find her. As this job takes him down a dark path though, will he be able to get out alive? And if not, whom might he take with him?

This was really intense. Even though I watched it lying in bed, I was figuratively on the edge of my seat a lot of the time. It's a dark intense though, no punches are pulled here. This isn't the standard middle class American white girl getting grabbed from the Hobby Lobby parking lot version of trafficking we see in a lot of action movies, this is closer to what it really is, young girls and boys who are either sold by drug-addicted parents, or who have run away from bad situations and are vulnerable to being exploited like this. Nothing's overly elaborate, there aren't rich businessmen flying in on private jets to bid on girls in fancy auctions, these are dark rooms where girls are drugged and preyed upon by local degenerates that have the money. Nate plays a great hero too. He's not Superman, he can't take out five guys at once with lighting quick martial arts skills--even though we do have a really nicely-choreographed knife fight at one point--this is part a dramatic lead with more depth, yet also not afraid to mix it up with a baseball bat to get things done. Then our two main baddies, played by Manjot Sumal and Karim Nasif, are definitely evil, but they aren't scenery chewing baddies, they're just evil, which helps ground the film. And finally the other major standout for me was Grace Cordell as Gemma. Usually her type of character in a film like this is solely there to be our hero's humanity and emotional surrogate, but because Nate is doing more of that already in his performance, she can be more independent--she's a sex worker that doesn't need to be saved by the hero. I had a little trouble with the ending, which I'll discuss further down the post with spoiler warnings, but overall I really enjoyed it. It's an intense, dark thriller, so if you're looking for something in that vein, this will do the trick.

Technically this is the fourth film I've seen of Nate's, but the third one, The Baby in the Basket, hasn't been released yet, so you won't get my thoughts on that one until then. As far as how this one stacks up with those other two, it's hard to say because they're all so different. This is probably closer in feel to When Darkness Falls, but I think this one is much darker than that one. Like there's a scene where a young girl, played by Emily Crawley, gets into a cab that's driven by Karim Nasif. It's so frightening but so dark and depraved too, the way Nasif starts asking her questions about herself that go from slightly off to downright creepy, but we know it's going to get worse, and it does when his friend gets in the backseat and he's all over her, and she's realizing she's in a horrible situation. In these interactions, Shepka and company are not letting us off easy, not to say he did let us off easy in When Darkness Falls, but that was a more straight ahead thriller, while this is absolutely disturbing at times. But it's also not disturbing for the sake of being disturbing, this is a compelling story with great performances too, which elevates it beyond the dark nature of the subject matter and how it's being depicted.

About that subject matter, you've probably heard me either on here, or on the pod, discussing the human trafficking trope that's popular in modern action movies. Part of it comes from Taken, part of it from the "baddie in a can" element that allows us to have villains without a lot of development, because how do you not want to see a trafficker get his comeuppance? It also lends itself well to the damsel in distress being rescued by our white knight hero construct. The usual approach is, middle class, beautiful--many times virginal--white girl gets picked up by some baddies, and it's a race against time before she's defiled by these ne'er do wells. In my short action novel, Bainbridge, I tried to do a take on the Eastern European trafficking I'd read about, where young women apply for what they think are office jobs, but end up kidnapped and shipped across Europe to underground brothels, only in my case I used girls from Mexico trafficked into the US instead. What Nate and company do here though is look at the most common kind of trafficking, the kind that FBI agents here in the US spend countless hours on the dark web trying to crack down on, and nothing like the popular depiction in Jim Caviezel films or whatnot. These aren't girls who found a water bottle on their car at a Hobby Lobby parking lot, the kind of baseless urban legend stuff your aunt may post on her Facebook wall, they're girls whose parents sold them for drugs, or who had no family and were taken in by people who they thought cared for them, or who went to a party and were drugged and kept in a hotel for a weekend. This isn't your fun action movie trafficking, and I think the film is better for it. At the same time, we have Grace Cordell's Gemma character who is voluntarily doing sex work to make some extra cash. When Alex says how he felt guilty paying her for sex, like he was taking advantage of her the way the johns were in the brothels of trafficked girls he found, she's assertive in telling him she was doing sex work of her own volition, she wouldn't be doing it if she didn't want to. It's a great juxtaposition to show both sides, that sex work doesn't automatically equal trafficked; but also, I think it removes this more insidious part of the conversation that has less to do with keeping young men and women out of unsafe situations, and more about controlling this idea of a woman's "virginity" as some kind of sacred thing. I thought it was a good move to use Cordell's character that way to further ground the film, especially when we're dealing with such disturbing material.

(And don't think it wasn't lost on me that in the UK teachers get paid enough that Gemma had to turn to sex work to make extra money because her father ran up charges on her credit cards then disappeared. In America teachers get paid so little that just doing sex work on the side would've been believable even without the family member putting her into debt.)

SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!! SPOILER ALERT!!!

I used that rant on how poorly we pay our teachers in the US to give a further buffer so I can discuss the ending without spoiling it for anyone who hasn't seen it. The term "Shakespearean," among many Americans anyway, usually means "a story where everyone dies at the end," and that's kind of the case here, which I got, but I thought it was a bit harsh for the characters. First we have the young girl that was trafficked. With all that she went through, and all that Alex went through to rescue her, for her to die after, however it happened, felt unfulfilling. Then Gemma, she's kidnapped by the baddies, tied up and gagged, shot in the leg, then after a melee she gets on top of Manjot Sumal and beats him, only to be shot in the head. For all she brought to the movie, and how we became invested in her, that one may have been harshest of all. And then when Alex dies, I get that there's that sense that he lost everything by letting the darkness of this task envelope him, but I think I just would've preferred a better outcome for him too. You could also make the point that it would've been even harsher if he had died while Gemma lived, because he then misses out on the nice life they could've had together. Ultimately, these are choices filmmakers make to tell the story they want to tell, the way they want to tell it, and maybe my issue as a storyteller is I'm afraid to kill my characters off or give them a bad ending, which I understand, it could be more me than them, it just means this is an area in the film that didn't resonate as much with me, which I think is okay too.

END SPOILER ALERT!!! END SPOILER ALERT!!! END SPOILER ALERT!!!

Finally, while that isn't Wayne Rooney in that shot, it's Graeme MacPherson, it looks a lot like him, doesn't it? As an Arsenal fan, Rooney's not really one of my favorites, but the idea of having a Wayne Rooney look-a-like is fantastic. Like how Robert Bronzi has made an entire career out of looking like Charles Bronson, could MacPherson do the same? And maybe loosely imply he's Rooney without saying it, like MacPherson plays a "former famous footballer" that's either a cop on the edge, or a baddie running a trafficking ring, or maybe best of all, running a Dark Kumite a la Ben Franklin in Bloodsport IV. And though twice helicopters have been blown up using American footballs, I don't think anyone has blown one up with a non-American football, aka a "soccer ball." We'll have to ask Will from Exploding Helicopter to be sure, but it feels like a film with MacPherson looking like Rooney is the place for it to finally happen. I can see the whole thing now, the hero's a former famous footballer who missed a big penalty late in his career. It's always haunted him. But now he's the fly in the ointment in a Die Hard scenario, and at the end, as the baddie's about to escape in a helicopter, his only chance to get him is to kick a soccer ball at the helicopter, with C4 attached to it of course, and he bends it perfectly, blowing the machine to bits in spectacular fashion. Instead of "Sudden Death" we could call it "Injury Time."

And with that let's wrap this up. As of January 7th, this will be available on VOD and DVD here in the States, and then January 27th on VOD in the UK. This is well-worth checking out and supporting. It's dark, doesn't pull punches, and keeps you on the edge of your seat, but also develops compelling characters that are well-scripted and well-acted. It's just really great stuff.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17044894

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!

Cash Out (2024)

Back in October Ty and I covered this on episode 180 of the podcast. It had a lot going for it as far as a movie we cover, from the Travolta, to the other guest stars, to the fact that it was directed by Randall "Scandal" Emmett, to its availability on Hulu. Even if it was bad, it would be a good amount of material, right?

Cash Out has Travolta as this world-renown thief/bank robber, who finds out his girlfriend, Kristin Davis, was an undercover FBI agent, and she almost busts him on one of his jobs. He escapes to a nice place out in the woods to retire, but his younger brother, Lukas Haas, has a big bank score he wants Travolta in on. Even though he says no, he finds out Haas is still going through with it, and shows up to the bank just in time for things to go south, leading to an Inside Man-esque scenario. Luckily Kristin Davis is the negotiator--or unluckily for the hostages who were just planning to go to work that day or make a bank transaction, and now have Noel Gugliemi sticking a gun in their face and swearing at them. Hey, what's a little PTSD between friends, right? Will there be enough convoluted hackiness in the plot to get Travolta out of this situation?

You know it baby. Convoluted hackiness all day long. We got names, which helps, and a short runtime, which also helps; but the paint-by-numbers plot is actually too little for even this runtime--think more 45-minute episode of a syndicated TV show. There's also the matter of the fact that I'm supposed to be rooting for people who are treating innocent people this poorly. Usually in a film like this I can turn my brain off, but it was really off-putting, not any kind of Robin Hood or anything like that. And then there's Travolta. He's not like a De Niro or a Cage, where there's an Oscar in there; but also not Mel Gibson, where he's a next-level star who is only in this DTV schlock because he's a horrible racist/misogynist/anti-Semite; or Willis, who was a next-level star but had health issues. The movie needed Travolta to be like one of those four, but he's never really been that, which renders the whole thing unremarkable, unfortunately, even for free with a shorter runtime.

This is now five films for Travolta on the site, but only his third DTV flick--the others were Wild Card posts for Battlefield Earth and The Punisher--and in those other two DTV ones, we can see the phenomenon I spoke of above. The first of those was Killing Season with Robert De Niro, who, even though he was mailing it in so bad he couldn't even be bothered to put a stamp on the envelope, was De Niro enough that Travolta wanted to act opposite him, and created enough of a novelty effect; and then the second of those, Paradise City, where Willis was solid enough, plus we had a Stephen Dorff that we didn't have here helping to prop up the proceedings so Travolta could just relax and chew scenery. That's the Travolta we need, put him opposite someone slightly better than him, and let him dominate that space just below. What we need is a Face/Off 2 with him and Cage, directed by John Woo, throw it on one of the streamers like Hulu or Netflix, and let it rack up the views. Unfortunately we don't have that, but we have a lot more Travolta DTV stuff out there, so we'll see if we end up getting around to it.

Many people know Kristin Davis from Sex and the City, which I get, or her great appearance on Seinfeld, but for me it'll always be her run on Melrose Place. Our site doesn't have quite the same number of alumni from Melrose as we do from 90210--probably the one we've seen the most is Patrick Muldoon, who was great in Rage and Honor 2, but we also had Courtney Thorne-Smith in Side Out and Heather Locklear in Return of Swamp Thing, so we're not complete bereft of Melrose on here. After Melrose and the Seinfeld appearance, I think my next two favorites from Davis are the TV movies The Ultimate Lie, where she plays a call girl who mistakenly gets her dad as a client (Jay Harangue does a fantastic job giving it his treatment on his YouTube channel); and A Deadly Vision, where she plays a server ("waitress" back then) with psychic visions of a killer. This unfortunately doesn't reach those heights, but it could have, because she was great at the beginning as Travolta's girlfriend who ends up turning on him. From there it's blah negotiator stuff, that they try to dress up with banter between her and Travolta that falls flat too. I saw she had a film called Deadly Illusions with Dermot Mulroney and Greer Grammer that's on Netflix and looks like it has potential, but it also had a buck-54 runtime, which just sounds too onerous. Just give me a 90-minute remake of The Ultimate Lie with her playing the mom and Dermot Mulroney as the dad, and then any actress born in 1998 as the daughter. You'll have gold.

Getting back to the whole PTSD thing, it may sound like I'm being too sensitive, but this wasn't a fun robbery, we had Noel Gugliemi, who's made a career out of being scary, pointing a gun at people and yelling and swearing at them. There was nothing fun or nice about that, certainly not lovable rogue or anything like that. I think Emmett recognized that somewhat, because at the end they tacked on that Travolta wired a million dollars into each of their bank accounts for their trouble. It's an interesting conundrum, because it's easy to say "hell, I'd go through all that for a million dollars," but for the hostages, they don't know they're getting a million dollars, they're in a situation where they're being held at gunpoint by some angry, aggressive individuals. It's why when we have lovable roguish heroes who break the law, they don't do shit like that. They're nice, even fun, and the people being inconvenienced don't mind it because the roguish heroes are so charming. It's just more of the slap-dashery/convoluted hackiness we've grown to love and expect from these Randall Scandals, and to be fair, I think I would've forgiven it if the movie had been more exciting. That was the bigger offense, that they tried to stretch 45 minutes of material into 90 minutes of movie.

Finally, between this site, and my old "Matt, Movie Guy" Tumblr (which still exists, I just haven't updated it in forever), I've become obsessed with shot composition over the years for all my screen grabs. Recently I was on the LAMBcast to discuss the new Nosferatu, where I said some of the shot composition was so great, Wes Anderson would've had to leave the theater to have a cigarette, but that was probably more projection on my part, because I was marveling at all Tumblr post material Eggers was giving us. With that in mind, I present to you the lost opportunity above. You have this beautiful shot of Travolta looking at something--dog urinating on his outdoor potted plants? Bad Tik Tok video that makes no sense to him? Another script to a Randall Scandal movie? Either way, it looks great, especially centered in the frame like that with the wall in the background, except what the hell is that thing on the left there? It just borks up the whole thing! Come Randall Scandal, you're killing my perfect screen grab... or giving me material for a seventh paragraph, which I was really struggling for, so maybe it's not all bad.

And with that, let's wrap this up. You can currently get this on Hulu, which isn't bad, but this isn't exactly great either, which is too bad. What's good is the podcast episode Ty and I did on this one, number 180 in the archives. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts!

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt24131288

And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!