Sleepwalkers

eye Weekly magazine
April 16, 1992

King of horror Sleepwalking to the bank By Noah Cowan

No doubt about it. Best TV ad for a movie this year goes to Sleepwalkers. Drippy and romantic, then gruesome and terrifying, it will surely guarantee the film spectacular box-office success in its opening weeks, and perhaps beyond. The film, surprisingly, satisfies the expectations raised by the ad. This is truly a Sweet Spring Postcard from Stephen King. The actors are bouncy and cute, the scenario is romantic in a twisted way. It’s filled with witty doubles-entendres, the computer animation is fabulous, and things don’t get super-gruesome until late in the day. Still, is this really what we’re looking for in the perfect horror movie? “Sleepwalkers” refers to a race of shape-shifters—beings capable of altering their external appearances (which are naturally gooey and Alien-like). They move from town to town, feeding on virgins. King’s two sleepwalkers—Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his mom (get it? Mrs. Brady?)—have a hardcore incestuous relationship (played up for full Lynchian camp value). When they aren’t having sex, Charles goes to school to find some virgins and mom tries to kill the neighborhood cats.

Cats? Apparently, cats know exactly what the sleepwalkers are up to, and attack them on sight. Anyway, Charles settles on Tanya (Madchen Amick), and they start dating. After a sweet courtship, they go hang out in a graveyard and, well, Charles gets a little fresh. Tanya is feisty—she fights back (with the help of a doomed cop) and escapes. But not for long. My problem, I guess, is that I expect more from a horror film. The new style—propagated so effectively by the Nightmare series and recent King work—which softens the blow of brutal violence with corny jokes, may be a crowd-pleaser, but it doesn’t leave you too shaken up. Sure, you get your requisite two dozen “Boo!” scares (most of which, frankly, are predictable), but the gut-wrenching fear that good horror can inspire just seems to have disappeared from the genre. Very sad. Equally disturbing is King’s lack of originality. Some may claim Sleepwalkers is a brilliant pastiche of quotes from the history of horror—an assembly of cats mimics Hitchcock’s The Birds, for example—but, too often, they seem more like ill-conceived rip-offs. The borrowing from the two Cat People films—spruced up with Total Recall animation effects—is particularly vexing. King’s lack of imagination is nowhere more in evidence than his reliance on cheap homophobic laughs and a “titillating” rape sequence to keep things moving. The old King used to deconstruct these classic stereotypes; the new King celebrates them.