Search - Sleepless on DVD

MPAA Rating: NR Content Advisory: Nudity, Not For Children, Sexual Situations, Gore Movie Release: 2001 DVD Release: 12/18/2001 Format: DVD - Pan and Scan Audio Tracks: English Subtitles: English, Spanish SwapaDVD Credits: 1 Number of Discs: 1 Run Time: 1 hrs 57 mins Studio: Live/Artisan Members Wishing: 3 Genres: Thriller, Crime Thriller, Psychological Thriller, Whodunit, Police Detective Film

Director Dario Argento, best known for his stylishly bloody horror films, revisits the style and themes of his early directorial efforts in this tense crime thriller. A prostitute (Barbara Lerici) discovers one of her customers has a taste for much rougher sex than she's willing to give him; trying to sneak away from her john, she accidentally walks off with one of his scrapbooks, from which she discovers her client apparently committed a series of unsolved murders almost 20 years earlier. The john tracks down the prostitute and murders her to insure her silence; this awakens in him the desire to kill again, and soon he's once again leaving a bloody swath across Italy. Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow), the police detective who investigated the earlier wave of killings, is brought out of retirement when clues link the new murders to those committed in the early '80s, and the aging cop finds his sometimes foggy memory jolted back to recognition by the growing number of bloody victims. Meanwhile, Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), whose saw his mother being killed by the murderer as a boy, learns that the killer is back at work, and sets out to investigate the case on his own. Non Ho Sonno features an original musical score by the rock band Goblin, who also wrote music for a number of Argento's best-known films. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Max von Sydow - Ulisse Moretti
Stefano Dionisi - Giacomo
Chiara Caselli - Gloria
Rossella Falk - Laura De Fabritius
Paolo Maria Scalondro - Commissioner Manni

There's a sequence near the finale of Sleepless that the "slow step" button on your DVD remote was made for: It's a gunshot through the head of the villain, probably the nastiest piece of gore effect you'll see all year and one of the all-time great gunshot wounds. Those with a stomach for that sort of thing -- those who renew their subscription to Fangoria months before it runs out -- will notice that makeup effects supervisor Sergio Stivalleti has managed to make it look as if a speck of light is emerging from the hole in the unfortunate victim's head as the flesh is blown away. The full-screen digital transfer of Sleepless suffers from Dario Argento's selection of film stock; apparently, he uses a brand that makes every day look overcast and grainy, or perhaps it was the weather, whatever. The overall impression is one of continuous darkness around the borders the way cheapie color films looked in the 1970s. The opening page of the interactive menu is pretty cool when you activate it -- a stylized skull rushes at you with a brooding scream -- and the Dolby Digital 5.1 sounds clean and clear (it's also in Dolby 2.0). ~ Buzz McClain, All Movie Guide