A movie like Sleepwalkers was advertised as the first movie Stephen King had written for the movies that wasn’t based on a previous body of work. And it shows why King is better at writing novels than he is at writing scripts. I don’t know what it is but his scripts aren’t the best. I’m sure there are table read-throughs but maybe people are afraid of telling him that something looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work well when spoken.
That’s not to say that Sleepwalkers doesn’t have a great premise for a creature feature. Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his mother, Mary (Alice Krige), are shapeshifting feline creatures that feed off the energy of virgin women. They are the last of their kind and live a nomadic life. They also have an incestuous relationship. The movie opens in Bodega Bay, Calif., notable because it was the filming location for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The police, led by Sheriff Jenkins (Mark Hamill during his pornstauche phase of the early 1990s) are doing a welfare check at a house. Many cats have been slaughtered and are hanging from the trees. Inside they find the body of a teenage girl whose body looks like its been mummified.
The movie switches location to small-town Indiana. However, the movie was still filmed in California because why film in Indiana?Yet, there’s a lot of mountainous terrain around that’s typical of southern California. Charles has set his sights on a local teen Tanya Robertson (Madchen Amick), who works at the local movie theater. The movie never explains how Charles is able to tell she’s a virgin but he tries to woo her over several days to suck her life and then give it to Mary who is in need.
Charles and Mary have the power of illusion and telekinesis. However, their main weakness is cats who have a sense to detect them and gather around their new house in Indiana. Charles nearly blows his cover when a teacher, Mr. Fallows (Glenn Shadix), doesn’t believe he’s from where Charles says he is. Why does the teacher not bring this to the administration’s attention is because there’s a hint that Fallows wants Charles to perform sexual acts on him. However, Fallows sees what Charles really is but it’s too late and he falls victim.
Then, we meet the true hero of the movie, Clovis (Sparks), a male tabby cat that is the furbaby of Dep. Andy Simpson (Dan Martin), who rides along with his daddy while he does his patrol. Simpson ends up chasing Charles in his blue Trans-Am who decides for some reason to speed recklessly along a country road and nearly run over children getting off a school bus. I mean, this is totally blowing his cover. But since the sleepwalkers can’t be killed by bullets, I guess Charles doesn’t give a fuck.
However, since Simpson is a black man, the character falls victim to King’s stereotypical portrayal. I mean, by the early 1990s, he was still living in Maine and I don’t think many black people live in Maine compared to white people. But since he lives a lot in Florida now, it’s a different world. The scenes with Clovis provide a little but of unintentional humor. Or should I say camp.
The movie seems to go off the rails during the introduction of Simson and Clovis and takes a dive into Looneyville. If King was still snorting cocaine and drinking even mouthwash to get drunk, this could’ve been explained. But he was supposed to be clean and sober for years while writing this. I think the blame has to be put on Mick Garris as director. Garris and King have had one of the strangest work collaborations in the history of movies and TV. But it’s never produced a lot of good quality entertainment. Garris cut his teeth working for Steven Spielberg on Amazing Stories and I guess he’s dined out on the fact he co-wrote Hocus Pocus for Disney. But his directing style leaves a lot to be desired. Granted he did assemble the underrated Master of Horror anthology but this is indicative of his style.
Garris was hand-picked by King and maybe the director should have told King some stuff needs to be freshened up. However, the second half of the movie doesn’t really work as horror. When Ron Perlman pops up as the cocky State Police Captain Soames, it’s like he thought it was a comedy. King himself pops up as a cemetery caretaker who talks to forensic techs played by Tobe Hooper and Clive Barker. The scene is played for laughs. John Landis and Joe Dante also appear as lab techs.
But the craziest casting is Lyman Ward and Cindy Pickett as Tanya’s parents, Donald and Helen. You may remember them as the parents of Ferris Bueller. They were married after appearing in that movie and then got a divorce after they filmed this movie. It’s not known if the filming of this movie had anything to do with it.
Krige as Mary steals the show. You may remember her best as the Borg Queen from Star Trek: Contact and the other Star Trek shows she’s appeared on. I feel somehow she felt the role was campy but the paycheck cleared so she was going to have some fun with it. The problem is there’s such a build-up of Charles for the first half, but he does very little in the second half. He gets wounded by Clovis and spends the final act covered in a cheap make-up that resembles something out of Dr. Seuss’s Whoville. And the same can be said for Mary’s make-up. It’s not scary at all, but it’s more comical like in The Exorcist: Believer.
And when the sleepwalkers change their whole appearance to a werecat like appearance, they look more like slimy bipedal salamanders with a cougar face that doesn’t move much. The budget was reported at $15 million and that was still big for 1992. But even a scene where the town sheriff, Ira Stevens (Jamie Haynie), tries to shoot Mary as a cat is on her back, it clear looks like some plush toy the prop department bought from a retail store. And in a comical sense, the said toy goes flying doing cartwheels in mid-air as the buckshot blows it away.
Garris faced similar criticism on Critters 2: The Main Course, his first movie as director, where the title characters looked less creepy and more like hand puppets moving back and forth as they’re shaken under a platform by lowly key grips. To say this movie is over the top is an understatement. During a shoot-out with the police, Mary manages to fire regular bullets at patrol vehicles making them explode. She takes a corn cub and stabs a deputy in the back and even bites the fingers off Soames.
I’m just wondering if the casting of Perlman is an in-joke as he had played Vincent, the lion-faced main character of the TV show Beauty and the Beast. Perlman, himself, is known for his feline-faced features. He horribly overacts in the role. Not to say, he isn’t a great actor. He’s a favorite of actor filmmakers Jean-Jacques Annaud and Guillermo Del Toro. I think he approached it the same way Krige did. The paycheck is nice and been cashed. What are they going to do – fire him?
Garris just isn’t a good director even though The Stand might be his best achievement. I have problems with that one. Yet, the haunting montage of people dead suddenly after getting the virus as Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” shows he has skills and talent. Sometimes a good director needs a better editor. There’s a silly scene of Tanya trying to make her escape in a patrol car but she apparently doesn’t know how car keys work and spends much more time than anyone would starting the engine. Then, she only is able to drive the car five feet in reverse before hitting a tree. And the scene is lacking in thrills.
Even more hilarious is watching the blank expression on the cats as they watch Mary’s body burn up as you can tell these are shots that were inserted (Giggity!) into final cut of cats watching someone off-camera shake a light at them. Other commenters have noted during the car chase sequence, a squirrel manages to create a big goof as it is shown running out toward the road and then turning around and running away. When a squirrel can draw your attention away from a car chase scene, then you have to re-evaluate things. Didn’t someone see this in the dailies? Or maybe it was left in intentionally the same way Eli Roth will make his movies seem too goofy with a mullet-haired kid doing martial arts and screaming “Pancakes!” Or maybe they just didn’t have the money to shoot the scene again.
Despite the negative reviews, Sleepwalkers managed to make some money bringing in over $30 million at the time. Considering studios during the 1990s often saw the period from February to April has a time to release the smaller budget movies that had no chance of winning good awards but could still make a few bucks, it’s quite an accomplishment. I’m still surprise, the studios released three big-budgeted movies (Dune Part Two, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and God x. Kong: The New Empire) during the month of March this year.
It’s not a stellar horror movie. But it is good for about an hour and a half of mindless entertainment. At least, it’s worth watching just to see how outrageous it is. There was a sequel proposed with a concept written by King’s wife, Tabitha, about a girl’s basketball team. However, Garris said since the movie didn’t make a lot of money, there wasn’t much interest in a sequel and he’s never read the treatment concept Tabitha King wrote. Joe Russo, part of the Russo Brothers behind many well-received MCU movies, has said there has been a conversation with a production company about five years ago, but “it was nothing more than flirting.”
Some movies just seem to exist perfectly, whether they’re good or not so good, in the time frame they were released.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 