SLEEPWALKERS
A review in the public domain
by The Phantom
(sbb@panix.com)
The Phantom hardly knows where to start. He supposes that he should begin by pointing out that SLEEPWALKERS is not still another in a long line of perfectly awful Stephen King adaptations, in part because Stephen King apparently wrote the original screenplay himself. And in part because it is not, in fact, perfectly awful. It's only imperfectly awful, which is certainly a step in the right direction, coming as SLEEPWALKERS does fast on the heels of THE LAWNMOWER MAN, yet another spiritless, insipid, King-inspired horror film in the grand tradition of CHILDREN OF THE CORN and MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE.
In fact, in many ways, SLEEPWALKERS is really quite good, although it hardly qualifies as a horror classic. Or a good Stephen King tale. Or even a film that's worth going too far out of your way to see. By now, many phans will have read the early reviews in the Usenet movies newsgroups and concluded from the sheer uniformity of their recommendations that SLEEPWALKERS isn't worth their time, and that they would be better off spending their $7.50 on that new and rather frighteningly politically correct animated film about rain forests. After all, although SLEEPWALKERS features gore galore -- a surprising amount of it, considering that it's a major studio release -- it does not as well feature the twin bonuses of seeing Sharon Stone naked every 5 minutes and Michael Douglas walk around without any pants on. Fiscally prudent filmgoers are always looking to get the most for their money, and in this respect SLEEPWALKERS doesn't even come close to more socially acceptable films like BASIC INSTINCT.
However, this is not to say that SLEEPWALKERS is entirely without merit (observant phans will note that saying that a film is not entirely without merit is among the highest praise the Phantom has ever lavished on a King adaptation, MISERY excepted). It may in fact be most enjoyable to those phans who can spot all the other films that get ripped off (or are paid homage to, if you -- like Brian DePalma -- prefer to think of it in slightly more civil terms); certainly that was one of the reasons the Phantom had a fairly good time throughout most of the film. And the ripoffs come fast and furious, starting with BLUE VELVET and continuing with, among others, NEAR DARK, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, THE SHINING, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and LIFEFORCE. And those are just the ones that come to mind as the Phantom writes this paragraph; chances are that another half dozen will occur to him before he finishes this review.
The story, such as it is, revolves a mother and son family of "sleepwalkers," a race of beings the film helpfully defines for us as perhaps the forerunners of those creatures we call vampires. They, like vampires, need human blood to remain forever young; however, unlike vampires they don't mind daylight, don't have to sleep in coffins, and tend to hang around cemeteries only if they're on a date or having a picnic. And they're deathly afraid of cats. (That's with a lowercase "c," rather than "Cats" the Broadway show; the Phantom can sympathize with both fears, though only because he suffers from occasional cat hair-induced allergies and is not otherwise predisposed to like animals who deposit dead rodents on one's bed. And Andrew Lloyd Weber's perpetual-money-machine still gives him the chills whenever he passes it on his way to some form of entertainment that doesn't require grown adults to look like living outtakes from THE WIZARD OF OZ.)
Why they should be so afraid of cats is -- like so many other things -- never adequately explained by King's near-illiterate script. Yet because Mick Garris (the director) keeps the film rolling along, we don't generally have time to think about its seemingly endless supply of absurdities. In fact, Garris does about as well as can be expected from any director given the material with which he had to work; the Phantom was pleasantly surprised at the number of Raimi-esque touches throughout the film, and he is heartened to think that directors other than Sam Raimi, Brian DePalma, the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick may occasionally try camera angles other than those approved by the television networks for their ever-so-inventive movie-of-the-week presentations. (With luck, we'll see something else from Mr. Garris sometime soon; with hope, it will be something with a significantly better screenplay.)
We are also treated to "discount morphing" every 10 minutes or so, presumably because the film's budget could not justify even more morphing than that. "Morphing," as those who follow the special effects industry, watch Michael Jackson's videos, or have seen TERMINATOR 2 -- that is, presumably everyone in the world -- know, is the less-impressive-with-every-viewing effect that shows one object smoothly transforming into another. For example, imagine the auditorium in a theater showing SLEEPWALKERS on successive Friday nights: if seen in fast motion, the appearance would be of a room growing steadily more and more empty, as a packed house on opening night smoothly transforms into a near-empty auditorium just two weeks later. (In fact, the Phantom suspects that the theater manager at the Loews Astor Plaza in New York City -- one of the largest theaters on the east coast -- will have a pretty good feel for the delightful "morphing" effect by the end of April, as he counts the days until the May 15th release of LETHAL 3 will again allow him to fill the 1000 seats in his theater.)
As if that weren't enough, we also get a healthy dose of splatter as people's hands are ripped off, fingers are chewed off, arms and necks are lacerated by knives and glass, eardrums are pierced and bodies are set on fire; apparently the MPAA has fled the country after having given BASIC INSTINCT their seal of approval for our nation's ever-impressionable youth and no one is minding the censorship store. (Hint to George Romero: re-edit and -release your DEAD films ASAP and see if the MPAA will give them a pass this time around if you throw in a naked bisexual bleached blonde or two. After all, cannibalism, ice-pick murders -- what's the difference, really, as long as it's between consenting adults?) The Phantom is, of course, the last to mourn our nation's moral disintegration, and far be it for him to complain that a film has perhaps one too many scenes of someone losing a body part; still, for a film that is advertised in such a wholesome way and has so many attempts at levity scattered throughout it to descend to point where it feels it must swing half-cats at the screen -- the Phantom supposes he should consider himself fortunate that SLEEPWALKERS wasn't filmed in headache-inducing "Freddy-Vision" -- well something seems just a little amiss.
What's amiss, as it turns out, is apparently a coherent story, or at least one that's not filled with so many plot holes that the filmmakers feel they must resort to every horror cliche in the book to compensate. The biggest problem, as the Phantom has already mentioned, is the film's atrocious script, a problem that must be laid directly at the feet of the master of horror himself, a man who with SLEEPWALKERS can't seem to keep himself focused on a single, tellable tale. Although 100-page-long digressions are always welcome in the context of King's cinder-block-shaped novels, they simply do not belong in a film that is only 90 minutes long. And the answer is not to make the film even longer; instead, the answer is to confine oneself as a writer or director to a single story idea that can be told well on film. This is something that Kathryn Bigelow did to perfection with her excellent first feature, NEAR DARK, a film which will likely remain the final word on modern retellings of the vampire legend for quite some time; it's also a film that is "paid homage to" throughout SLEEPWALKERS. Unfortunately, the effect of this is to make us wish we'd taken our $7.50 to Blockbusters and rented NEAR DARK instead of using it to encourage Stephen King to write still more bad screenplays and collaborate in yet another disappointing horror film.
King's script veers all over the place, from allusions to BLUE VELVET and NEAR DARK to wholesale ripoffs of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (the Phantom counted 2 complete scenes that were lifted directly from John Landis' far superior film, and he was hardly paying attention most of the time), and along the way King has his characters behaving in the most ridiculous and unlikely ways imaginable. Going on a first date with the mysterious but charming new boy in town? Why not have a picnic at Homestead Cemetery, apparently your staid Midwestern town's version of lovers' lane? Trapped in your home by hundreds of extremely domesticated and unthreatening-looking house cats? Why not avoid at all costs the acquisition of 6 large Dobermans, each of whom could eat a dozen of those cats for lunch without working up a sweat, in favor of a single ineffectual bear trap? And on and on; it's almost as if King were saying to us, "I have no respect at all for your intelligence, so I'll just have my characters do the most expedient thing possible to move my screenplay forward." The shame of it is that in his novels, King takes the trouble to give his characters something at least resembling motivation, and in general he doesn't have them behave like complete idiots most of the time. His screenplays, however, have been uniformly contemptuous of the audience; either that, or he doesn't take writing for the screen as seriously as he does writing for the New York Times best seller list.
SLEEPWALKERS also suffers from a bad case of Freddy-itis (the tendency to crack wise when the film would do better maintaining a serious tone) at times, and the film overall amounts to much less than the sum of its parts, perhaps due to King's inability to focus, or perhaps due to the extremely artificial look of the film itself, which appears to have been shot entirely indoors on a back lot somewhere far away from the Midwest.
That said, the Phantom should note that SLEEPWALKERS is enjoyable enough as these exercises in parting gullible filmgoers from their entertainment dollars go (phans may remember that the Phantom enjoyed William Friedkin's even more loopy 1990 film THE GUARDIAN; if the Phantom can find evil trees and Druid nannies entertaining, he can certainly be diverted by wholesale gore and discount morphing). Garris keeps the film moving, and many individual scenes are quite effective. And if one can overlook the inevitable scenes of people in giant, unlikely-looking bug suits (or perhaps they were giant cat suits -- the light was bad and it was difficult to tell, though mercifully no one started singing "Memories"), and the few brief scenes in which fat and lazy-looking housecats bestir themselves and leap unlikely distances to attack the sleepwalkers -- scenes that brought back fond memories of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL's killer rabbit -- then it is quite possible to enjoy SLEEPWALKERS for what it is: a few good ideas, well-handled by a talented director and special-effects crew but ultimately sabotaged by a writer who should stick to paperbacks.
(Goodness, even the Phantom's obligatory "that said" paragraph ended on a critical note. Perhaps SLEEPWALKERS doesn't even deserve a "that said," though the Phantom did in fact enjoy parts of the film. It's certainly a better film than THE LAWNMOWER MAN, and the Phantom can without difficulty think of many worse horror films that have been released in the past year or so -- CHILD'S PLAY 3 comes quickly to mind, as does the final nail in the ELM STREET coffin, FREDDY'S DEAD. It's worth a rental, so be sure to visit your local Blockbusters in about 4 months. In the meantime, phans would do well to rent any of the films to which SLEEPWALKERS "pays homage," but especially Kathryn Bigelow's horror classic, NEAR DARK, a film that proves -- once again, and most theatrical horror releases to the contrary -- that low-budget horror can be both literate and very entertaining.)
(Second of three parenthetical paragraphs: phans should note that the BASIC INSTINCT of horror is already available as Tobe Hooper's extremely silly and quite frankly terrible LIFEFORCE. Naked bleached blonde space vampires abound, though sadly there are no messy ice-pick murders. At Blockbusters everywhere, under "B" for bad.)
(Finally, a point in SLEEPWALKERS' favor: it has a surprisingly low Spring-Loaded Cat quotient, given the considerable temptations the filmmakers must have felt. Kudos to Garris for keeping the cats-in- the-closet, 120dB ringing telephones, and hands-on-the-shoulder to a minimum.)
: The Phantom : sbb@panix.com : cmcl2!panix!sbb
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