Sleepwalkers (1992) Review

Sleepwalkers (1992) Review

I had hope that the infrequently-mentioned Sleepwalkers might just be one of those forgotten early 90’s Stephen King gems. It’s an original screenplay from King, and directed by Mick Garris, who went on to direct many other successful movies and mini-series based on King’s work (several of them scripted by King, as well). Unfortunately, that combo plus this movie does not equal forgotten gem. 

Sleepwalkers are vampire-like creatures that can make things invisible and turn into hairless cat monsters upon will, and two of them, a mother and son, live in a small town together, and the mother is getting weak, so to feed her, the son starts pursuing a girl he goes to school with.  

Apparently they also attract cats (and the two species hate each other), so there are tons of cats hanging around their property, and the mom sets bear traps all around for them. It’s definitely easy for cat-lovers to hate these characters (they kill several cats in the movie) but what’s weird is it tries to play up that the son is an okay guy, when it’s obvious from the beginning he isn’t, so when the little “reveal” about twenty minutes in comes that he’s a sleepwalker, it’s like, yeah, of course. 

But what’s really weird is the son and mother’s incestual relationship. She wants him to go after the girl at school, who takes pictures of gravestones as a hobby (I don’t know why but this whole “weird hobby” idea just comes across as lame and desperate, c’mon Steve you can do better than that!) but he doesn’t even try to suck her blood, he tries sucking her life-force or whatever it is out of her mouth. It’s kind of like how that little troll monster tries to suck the breath out of Drew Barrymore in Cat’s Eye. In other words, it’s really lame.    

The teenagers are pretty dull, despite their unique attributes/hobbies, but the acting isn’t overly bad, just bland. The mother is a sultry seductress and it’s a pretty decent performance, but toward the end she has some really bad one-liners, and her true form (as well as the son’s) is where the movie becomes total schlock. The effects aren’t awful, but the creature design is. When they become half-monster-half-human it looks like unfinished, unpainted test makeup for Ron Howard’s The Grinch, and the full monster is like a wet, wrinkly naked mole rat fused with a cat from another planet.  

 

Let me quickly cover the three things I liked about this movie. While it’s slow to start and the main characters are uninteresting, at one point it suddenly cuts to a cop just sitting in his car with his cat, and damn is he funny, delivering great dialogue with gusto, and he loves his cat—I mean he absolutely adores his cat, it’s hilarious. Then the sleepwalker teen races by in his car and there’s a pretty decent car chase. The negative side to this is, we don’t get to see the cop character enough, and he gets killed too early on, though his death scene is over-the-top and gruesome. 

The third and final thing that’s awesome about Sleepwalkers are the cameos. There’s plenty of them, from American Werewolf in London director John Landis and The Howling director Joe Dante to Mark Hamill and Ron Perlman (though Perlman’s role is a bit more substantial than a cameo). But the best scene features Stephen King playing a cemetery caretaker, who talks to a forensics guy, played by Tobe Hooper (director of Salem’s Lot) then another forensics guy, played by Clive Barker (director of Hellraiser). It’s awesome to see so many horror legends all in one scene—so awesome, in fact, the cameos are even advertised on the DVD packaging. 

Unfortunately, that’s about it for what’s good in this movie. It’s not a pure horror movie, it’s too goofy and fright-less to be that, but it’s also not a horror-comedy, because it’s not really purposefully funny for more than a few small moments. So what is it, then? Well, it’s like most of the other movies written by Stephen King: a bit tongue-in-cheek and a bit over-the-top, but not truly frightening. 

Sleepwalkers is mediocre, but not a total blowout. It has an attractive cast and a couple entertaining moments, despite failing to deliver any scares, and in the end, I’d say in the realm of Stephen King movies, you could do a lot worse, but certainly a lot better.