We could have an entire section of this site dedicated to Stephen King horror movie adaptations, but I think the idea of having to watch his copious oeuvre is too frightening. But certainly not frightening in the way these movies or mini-series were intended, because the only elements in any of these productions that may force you to watch through your fingers are the maladroit acting, the cornpone scripts and the Mystery Science Theater-worthy production. The only thing that's scary about movies like Needful Things, The Dark Half and Graveyard Shift is that were made. And though it has been over two decades since Carrie and The Shining (i.e. the only watchable King adaptations in the horror genre), the general public's appetite for his pulpy page-turners never abated, and so the guilty pleasure of reading his potboilers metastasized into a Hollywood cancer. Someone had to cut it out, and finally, with the announcement of his retirement, it seems as if King has taken it into his own hands. Of course, the schlock cycle already has some King works in the offing, so we'll have to endure a few more Rose Reds in the near future, but I don't think we'll be watching a sequel to The Langoleirs ten years from now. And that's good news. So now that King's reign of terribleness is nearly at end, it seems an appropriate time to reflect on the worst of the worst. - RJR

Sleepwalkers:
Jeddy Goodwill

In an interview, Stephen King once remarked that his books were the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. A Number 1 Value Meal never made me feel this lousy. Touted as his first "original" screenplay, Sleepwalkers is nothing more than a super-sized smorgasbord of King’s literary clichés—muscle cars, sleepy enclaves, mystical cats and Grand Guignol gore. The titular villains here are members of a dying breed of shape-shifting, telekinetic were-cats, who fuel their vampiric existences with the life force of virgins and are impervious to everything except cat scratches. Sound stupid? It is. But it gets worse—Sleepwalkers are also sexually aberrant, unfunny and not even remotely scary. No wonder their numbers are dwindling.

Operating under the oh-so-clever alias "Brady," an incestuous mother-son Sleepwalker duo reconnoiter a Maine backwater for suitable fodder and find a delicious dish in the coquettish Tanya Robertson, played by Twin Peaks' Mädchen Amick. Only slightly more plausible than the existence of Sleepwalkers is that the thoroughly unprepossessing one in this movie—Charles, played by Brain Krause—could seduce a sylph like Amick. With a Van Der Beek-sized cranium and an anachronistic pompadour, the mojoless Charles's lickety-split courtship of Tanya is an insult to every well-coiffed man with an anatomically correct head. If Sleepwalkers did exist, they would have to lower their dating standards and start culling the virgin herd to survive.

And then there's the zinger-bloated script, an anthology of duds so fetid that it turns merely silly B-movie horror fare into intolerable dreck. It’s like listening to your high-school earth science teacher read from a Truly Tasteless Jokes volume. Here are some examples:

When Charles’ nosey lard-ass of an English teacher accosts him regarding some suspicious incongruities on his transcript, Charles gets indignant. “I think people should keep their hands to themselves,” he lectures right before he dismembers him. As he tosses his severed hand back to him, he deadpans, “Now here’s yours.”* During the climatic battle, Charles’ mother dispatches one of the bumbling flatfoots by stabbing him in the back with an ear of corn. Standing over the carnage, she quips, “No vegetables, no desert.”

If Sleepwalkers is a Big Mac, it’s made with an all Mad Cow beef patty. Stay away lest your brain explode.

Mike's Response:

Very recently, I stumbled upon Sleepwalkers on Cinemax, and considering Ron’s review, I figured that I should probably watch it.

Where I think Ron’s above review misses the mark, is that it doesn’t really let the reader know that this movie really isn’t very good. In fact, it’s quite bad.

Despite being just generally crappy, it also left me with a lot of questions:

  1. Why do the sleepwalker thingies light on fire when cats jump on them?

  2. The sleepwalker thingies look like cats, so why do the cats hate them? If any animal would make them burst into flames, you think it’d be dogs. The only thing I can figure is that the cats feel these cat-like creatures are giving the feline species a bad name.

  3. How is it possible that when the sleepwalkers are wrestling with said cats, it looks more laughable than Bela Lugosi wrestling with a big rubber octopus in Bride of the Monster?

  4. If you were to slam a corn cob into someone’s back or lift someone up over your head and slam them down on a frail white picket fence, wouldn’t the cob and fence break respectively, rather than the individuals involved in each assault finding themselves dying from impalement?

  5. Why did the Foley guy use the "Tfffpt" sound of a silenced (or "suppressed") gun shot for the mom sleepwalker’s punch?

  6. Did they really just have two police cars blow up from two single .35 millimeter gun shots, and are they really going to use the old car-won’t-start "CA’HMON!" in the last 5 minutes of the movie?

  7. After the car starts, and Madchen Amick gets away, cats leap on the mom sleepwalker and tear her to shreds, is Enya’s Boadicea really the appropriate song to play as her corpse burns and the credits roll?

  8. Wasn’t it a bad idea to cast Ron Perlman in the movie as a cop, when in his natural state, he looks a lot like the half human/half feline sleepwalkers? It just seems unnecessarily confusing.

  9. Do you know of any movies I can rent where Madchen Amick gets naked? Because I’d like to see that. (OK, granted, this is less of a rhetorical question.)

Also . . .watch out for a Clive Barker / Stephen King dueling bad acting cameo scene.

*Other Stand out Dialogue:

The kid sleepwalker: (after jamming a pencil in a cop’s ear) - "Cop Kebob!"

Cop: (shivering from a cold draft he walks through) "Cold Draft"
Other Cop: "Use one now couldja?" --MDG