Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is a horror of a horror movie. It's nonsensical and silly, and ridiculously campy at times. This normally would be the formula for a great B-Movie, but it doesn't work this time. As the name would suggest, this film is written by Stephen King. Coming from the guy who has written some of the most iconic horror novels of the 20th century, this mess of a screenplay leaves a lot to be desired.
The main problem with this film is the plot itself. The sleepwalkers are the main characters and villains of the film, but their presence and backstory is never explained, sans a few throwaway lines towards the middle, leaving us with some very confusing moments throughout the film. Apparently a mother-son sleepwalker duo has to consume the soul of a female virgin, and stupidly decide on an able-bodied 17-year-old, who ultimately ends up killing the both of them. Their plan to get the girl's soul is incredibly flawed complicated as well. For some reason they felt the need to move into a new home and register the son in school with false identifications, all to get to this one girl. Logically one would think the sleepwalkers would just go around the country feeding on little girls, sort of like vampires. This not only would be a safer bet for their set of rules, but save them a lot of trouble and help them avoid getting caught.
The characters are equally flawed and stupid. Not only are the sleepwalkers incompetent, but they have a creepy Oedipus complex thing going on, which is probably the only creepy part of this supposed horror movie. These scenes are completely unwarranted and add nothing to the plot, and seem to only be there to make the audience uncomfortable. The human characters are just as brainless. All of the protagonists fall prey to horror movie cliches, like poking the killer's body to make sure he's really dead. All of the characters are extremely flat as well. Our lead heroine gets the most screen time of the protagonists, but she still seems as thin as the paper her dialog was written on. A lot of the characters talk without ever saying anything important. There's a several points throughout the movie that could have had character development in them, but are instead pumped with filler dialog.
The special effects and death scenes in this film are both ridiculously stupid and ridiculously fake. The son sleepwalker spends the latter half of the film half-transformed into a sleepwalker, and looks like a reject from Cats: The Musical. When the duo finally reveals their true form, they look like the dog creatures from Ghostbusters, and the costumes look absolutely stupid. With the exception of a horribly fake hand-severing scene towards the middle of the film, all of the character deaths are crammed into the last 20 minutes. It's as if Stephen King forgot that his books usually have some violence in them, and decided to make up for lost time by making it stupidly over-the-top. There's bitten off fingers, broken limbs, gouged eyes, explosions, slashings, and a death by corncob. And in one of the strangest aspects of the film, the sleepwalkers' only weakness is cats. Yes, the sleepwalkers constantly remain in fear of cats, until they both get attacked by hordes of feral cats. But they don't get clawed to death as one my think; they burst into flame after being attacked, like a vampire exposed to sunlight.
The only interesting aspect of the movie is it's cast. There is an abundance of cameos in the third act of the film. Stephen King himself shows up in a shoehorned in role as a cemetery guard, who does nothing but act like his hillbilly character from "Creepshow". Among the less obvious cameos, however are horror directors Clive Barker and Tobe Hooper. John Landis also shows up for some reason, but I assume he's there because of his work on "An American Werewolf in London". There are a couple other familiar faces in the cast as well. Ron Perlman makes an early appearance as a police officer, but he's not on screen nearly long enough.
Overall, this is a very weird film. This is definitely not Stephen King's best work, and one he ought to look back on in embarrassment. The plot is very strange and silly, and the characters are painfully stupid at times. There's a lot of lame dialog and campy one-liners throughout, and it doesn't seem anything like the rest of Stephen King's work. It's definitely a film to pass unless you're a die-hard Stephen King fan. Not recommended.
Enjoyment- 2/5
Quality- 1/5
IMDB Page- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105428/
July 10, 2012
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