Macabre…ish Horror Review: 200 Hours
Sleep No More aka 200 Hours, 2017/ 1 hr 31 min
Graduate students, led by Dr. Whatley (Yasmine Aker), try to prove that after a certain amount of time, 200 hours, sleep becomes unnecessary. Except, they’re wrong. After a while, hallucinations get bad and so does the terror at whatever they are seeing.
So much so, one subject, Carter (Lukas Gage), uses a broken coffee mug to gouge out his eyes and slit his own throat to escape it.
In front of the board, to answer for Carter’s death, to find out how it happened and if the test drug, Cognifan, was to blame but no, he had no medication, he was the control. At least, that is what they were told.
One of the grad students, Frannie (Brea Grant), went over the video from the night of the incident to see if she noticed anything. But there’s nothing.
The grad students decide to recreate the study without waiting for the board. There is no chance any undergrads would volunteer, so they decide to volunteer themselves. Cogniphan could cure sleep and change the course of productivity. This could be a major breakthrough and they need to get this data, just in case the board votes against them and end all of their careers before they begin. And before pharma gets wind of it.
So they go for it. Miserable days of discomfort counting down to 200 hours, the supposed lucidity point. When all the hallucinations, shaking and paranoia will all go away and cognitive function is supposed to return as the medication builds up in the system. That’s what they are told is supposed to happen.
They discover their ‘hallucinations’ even in photos and video Frannie had seen prior that had nothing in, maybe what they are seeing aren’t hallucinations, at all. Maybe it’s real and always there. And now that they can see it, it’s dangerous.
Soon they’ve all see it and are asked to draw what they’ve seen to compare notes. It’s personal to each of them but still the same essence. And Dr. Whatley, she can’t see anything. But for everyone else, everyday, this entity gets clearer and clearer, in reality and photos.
Frannie wants to quit, they are all on edge but the rest continue on and it really starts getting bad once they make mistakes. And they’re more terrified than ever, Holly (Christine Dwyer), is injured when the entity touches her and the contact point of her skin is dead.
Dale (Stephen Ellis) builds a device to scope the entity out before they can see it, even behind closed doors. Then they see it fully, feeding on someone’s dreams. Afterward, Dale finds Holly, sawing the flesh from her arm with a knife. At 117 hours in, they decide to end it and take Holly to the hospital. Meanwhile, she keeps telling them to cut her.
Joe (Keli Price) and Frannie figure have an idea what these creatures are and what’s going on. They theorize that Cogniphan might end a symbiotic relationship that has always existed between these creatures and anything that dreams. While searching for documents to possibly prove their theory, they discover lies and forged documents.
Dr. Whatley shuts it down way too late. Dale loses it. People are dead. This study has failed.
This film by Phillip Guzman is set in 1986 and it is an overall good concept. There are jump scares and not a lot of blood and gore in the movie but during those moments, it is very graphic and gory. The effects are good and disturbing. The pacing is just right and the flick gets better as it goes on.
