When Ed Wood died he left behind very little. What he did leave, though, was a screenplay that he had worked on for years, a screenplay that inexplicably was written like a silent film. This script, known as The Silent Night or Night of Silence, eventually ended up in the hands of Aris Iliopulos, a part-time filmmaker who convinced Billy Zane, fresh off of Titanic, to produce and star in it. What these two crafted, with the help of many big named actors and actresses, is their tribute to a filmmaker that had all the heart, but none of the talent, needed to make low budget films.
The story of I Woke Up Early the Day I Died is pretty threadbare. An escaped mental patient robs a money lender store of $15,000, killing the manager in the process. While attending the funeral at a distance he manages to get knocked out and lose the suitcase the money is in inside the coffin he thinks is the managers. When he recovers he tracks down the coffin only to find the suitcase still there but empty. So he sets out to track down everyone that was at the funeral, killing each of them in an attempt to find the loot.
There is a wide array of character actors filling out the cast here, most of them game to ham things up to the Nth degree. This is, after all, an Ed Wood script and none of them seem to take things too seriously. Everyone is a type, a stereotype that doesn’t exist in the real world and this allows the performers to just let it loose and be utterly bizarre. I would ask how director Aris got so many talented performers to appear in this but, after seeing Movie 43, a movie much worse than this with an even better cast, I can’t say I’m surprised he got as many known actors as he did.
This film shouldn’t be watchable, it really shouldn’t. It’s so hammy and over-the-top that it should be unbearable. This isn’t like an Ed Wood film at all. In an attempt to replicate an Ed Wood film what they ended up making is a broad parody of a one of his films. Ed Wood had an earnestness to his films, even the schlocky horror films, that, while badly made, were really no different from the other low budget fare being churned out at the time. He had a bad eye for shots and a lousy instinct for what would and would not get noticed on screen. His actors, some of whom came back for I Woke Up Early The Day I Died, were no worse than those that littered the films of Bert I. Gordon or Roger Corman. There is a fine line between being a bad actor and trying to be intentionally bad. A classic Ed Wood movie is unintentionally silly and that type of thing cannot be replicated.
That’s not to say watching this film is a bad time; far from it. It is truly an incompetent film, just not in the same way a film like Glen or Glenda is. It does do a few things right, though. I loved the use of overlayed screenplay text in place of the interstitial cards old silent films would use. It smoothed over the patches where the film wouldn’t be able to communicate properly in the silent format. Some of the casting choices are truly hilarious like the clichéd use of giant actor Carel Struycken as a creepy undertaker, pairing him with short actor Max Perlich. Not only does this Mutt and Jeff pairing work for comedic effect, but Carel, who was known at this time for playing Lurch on The Addams Family films of the 90’s and looks like a walking skeleton here. Other comedic touches that work are the repeated use of musical cues from The Birds during the attack on Tippi Hedron, whose biggest film role, arguably is the Alfred Hitchcock classic. One memorable set-piece is scored to the on-screen musical performance of the legendary Eartha Kitt!
As an Ed Wood recreation this film fails. Without the branding one would not even realize this is supposed to be akin to the director’s works. As a bizarre film meant to be laughed at at every turn it succeeds. It’s just so strange that at first it is puzzling, then humorous, then outright hilarious. It’s the type of film you have to give some time to before you start to groove with the vibes. Audiences and studios didn’t know what to do with it when it sought distribution and so it made one appearance at a Toronto Film Festival, spent a week screening in New York, then vanished without so much as a home video release. Bootleggers kept it alive barely and it remains to this day a difficult film to find.
It’s an interesting experience in failure watching this movie. On the one hand it’s clearly not a good film. Yet on the other hand it is very watchable and never gets dull. One may ask What were they thinking when looking at it but we know what they were thinking. They were trying to recreate an Ed Wood film, thinking that an authentic Ed Wood script would do the trick. But they didn’t replicate his style the way they intended to. No one could. The only way that would have happened is if Ed Wood himself came out of the grave to direct this. His style of filmmaking is unique to himself only. Since that obviously didn’t happen what we got is a curiosity, a film that appealed to no one yet is oddly fascinating to watch, especially knowing the history behind it.
Release Date: September 10, 1998
Running Time: 90 Minutes
Rated NR
Starring: Billy Zane, Ron Perlman, Tippi Hedren, Andrew McCarthy, Will Patton, Nicolette Sheridan, Carel Struycken, Max Perlich, John Ritter, Karen Black, Sandra Bernhard, Eartha Kitt, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and
Christina Ricci
Directed By: Aris Iliopulos
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