From: sbb@panix.com (The Phantom)
Subject: Review: SLEEPWALKERS
Date: Mon, 13 Apr 1992 07:42:30 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix, NYC
Keywords: review, sleepwalkers, horror, phantom

                             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