Streaming Availability: Pluto TV
When it comes novels, Stephen King has a solid quality floor. He will not always write a masterpiece, but he usually writes something very readable and interesting.
In movies, that floor becomes a trap door leading to a pit that descends miles into the Earth. This man has lent his name to some serious trash - usually fun trash, sometimes things that simply belong in the garbage, like The Stand miniseries from 2020.
The problem is translating
the medium, what works on the page does not necessarily work on the screen. The
more accurate the adaptation, generally the worse it comes across. King’s sense
of humor is peculiar, his dialog is unnatural, and his greatest power as a writer is the inner thoughts of his character, which the film medium must do more subtly. When you adapt King faithfully, his words come off as bizarre,
awkward, and often tone deaf. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was its own take on
the novel (which King hated), and was a horror masterpiece. The more faithful 1997 miniseries
version was inferior in nearly every way. That later version was made exactly to
King’s specifications by his most faithful servant, director Mick Garris, who
also directed today’s movie, Sleepwalkers.
Interestingly, Sleepwalkers is not an adaptation. Rather it is
a completely original script Stephen King wrote specifically for the screen.
Unfortunately, while King is one of our greatest living novelists, he is not as
talented when it comes to writing screenplays. Sleepwalkers is fascinating movie with a
lot of positives. It is also fascinatingly strange with utterly inexplicable batshit
decisions. It confused critics at the time, and thirty years later I still am not sure what he was going for.
First of all, Steve, why is this movie called Sleepwalkers?
This movie is about a kind of energy vampire with magic powers, who also can turn
into rubbery cat monsters. An opening title card from a fictional “Chillicoathe
Encyclopaedia of Arcane Knowledge, 1884” calls these creatures ‘Sleepwalkers’
and claims they inspired our vampire legends. Much like Imhotep in the 1999 The
Mummy, they’re weak to regular old domesticated cats, who will burn them like the
old-fashioned bat-based vampire is burnt by sunlight. Nothing about this movie
has anything to do with sleeping, dreaming, walking in your sleep, or uses any
of those ideas as a metaphor that I can decipher. ...I suppose cats love to nap? Is that it?
Sleepwalkers is a strange movie made stranger by how it never
quite decides on what position it is taking with these feline demons. In the first
thirty minutes they are the protagonist, and the movie is trying for a kind of
sympathetic view of the isolated and dangerous life of an endangered species of
monster. But then, they turn full slasher villain, killing people in absurd ways like a
corn cob stabbed into a deputy’s spine, but not before punctuating the scene
with a cheesy quip. “No vegetables, no dessert - that's the rules.” I suppose
we do not need a rigid adherence to a single tone, you can have a tragic monster
but also huge splatter gore slapstick in one film. But do those things work
together in telling a coherent narrative?
Our initial lead is Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his
mother Mary (Alice Krige). Charles is falling in love with a beautiful girl
from his English class, Tanya (Mädchen Amick, Shelly from
Twin Picks). Unfortunately, Charles is a Sleepwalker, so he has to suck out Tanya’s
soul through her throat and feed his mother with it. Also, since Charles and Mary
appear to be the last of the kitty vampires, mother and son are having an
incestuous relationship. It is a huge choice, Sleepwalkers reveals it in ten
minutes, and I can imagine it creeping out audiences in 1992 - not the way they wanted to be scared. Again, there's a lot of vibes in this stew:
tragedy, disturbing transgressive sexual relationship, teen romance. I do not think the hammy quips do anything but confuse it all.
Speaking of quips and ham, Charles goes full Jokerfied
movie monster when he tries to kill Tanya. It is joke after joke, which is incongruous
with how Charles seemed to actually like Tanya and was distressed by his species’
feeding habits. So where did all this come from??
Now, it is time I introduce the greatest vampire hunter in
film history. That would be the glorious, heroic, devilishly handsome little Clovis (played by a cat named Sparks),
whose tag calls him “The Attack Cat”. Clovis is having none of this vampire
shit in his town, and he saves the day multiple times. First, he saves Tanya from
Charles, and fatally wounds the boy. Eventually he’ll be leading an entire army
to the Sleepwalkers’ door, ready to throw down. Van Helsing is shit compared to
Clovis.
While Charles is dying on his couch, we get a lot great
acting from Alice Krige. It is a heartbreaking moment a character's only love in the
world suffering. The thing is, I do not think any part of Sleepwalkers is
poorly performed or poorly shot. Alice Krige can be a beautiful older woman,
she can be a desperate ailing mother, and she can deliver ridiculous quips to
the camera. This is the best performance from her I’ve ever seen. Mark Hamill
is in on camera for only a cameo, reading these stern cop cliches, and he’s great.
Mädchen Amick and Brian Krause have a lot of chemistry. The weird mix of
tragedy and comedy even can work together, such as a brutally sad scene where
Mary makes Tanya dance with the animated corpse of her son. Mick Garris could
have easily phoned in this material and just shot a ninety-minute episode of Tales
from the Crypt. Instead, he’s pouring everything he can to keep this dynamic
and interesting: lots of camera moves, lots of crane shots, long takes.
However, as much as I admire the attempt here, the effects
just look terrible. I love old Eighties prosthetics but these rubber cat monsters look awful. I
wish I could be on the side of the ludicrous face morph, instead they're laughable. The final battle is a bunch of nonsense on screen. I know Sleepwalkers wants you to laugh
with it, I’m sorry, but I’m this gets hysterical in the wrong ways. In sixty years of vampire
reviews now, I never wanted to be so negative towards the craft. On the other hand, we get some good gore gags like when Mary Brady eats Ron Perlman’s fingers
or impales the sheriff through her white picket fence.
Next Time! I miss Dracula. I miss his old joke about how he doesn't drink... wine. It’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
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