Released in the spring of 1992, Sleepwalkers was a film that my friend Cerpts and I went to see, along with our long time friend Paul, who has since passed on to that big old movie theater in the sky. For the most part, if it’s a story with Cerpts, Paul, and me hanging out together in the 80’s or 90’s, chances are we were under the influence of the devil’s lettuce. So there we were in theater number 4 at the AMC Marlton 8 movie theater watching Sleepwalkers when someone yelled “Toonses” and we all lost out shit. You see all the characters that are Sleepwalkers in the film look like cats when they show their true form. When the main character Charles Brady (played by Brian Krause who might be better known as Leo on the TV series Charmed) first shows his true form he looks like a character that was in heavy rotation in skits on Saturday Night Live from ’89 to ‘92.
Toonces, the cat who could drive a car, was a stuffed cat who was being passed off as a real cat. Well, it was funnier than it sounds. So, yeah, aside from Krause, also starring is Madchen Amick (Twin Peaks and all it’s variations) as Tanya, a love interest for Charles. Odd thing is Charles has a really close relationship with his mother, played by Alice Krige (Silent Hill and Gretel & Hansel), I mean really close relationship. So, Ew! Mary, Charles’ mom, needs him to bring an innocent to her in order to feed off of their life force. That innocent is meant to be Tanya. The film was written by Stephen King and directed by Mick Garris who has made a career out of directing stories from Stephen King. I know I’ve talked about how I don’t like Stephen King stories directed by Mick Garris in the past but I saw decided to give this another try.
Sleepwalkers features cameos from a Who’s Who of horror icons with the likes of King himself as a cemetery caretaker, John Landis and Joe Dante as lab technicians, Clive Barker and Tobe Hooper as forensic experts, and there’s even an appearance by Mark Hamill as Lt. Jenkins, a cop. With a short run time of only 89 minutes there’s really not much time to tell a story here, let alone give any real backstory. We do get a nice rendition of The Rodeo Song from Dan Martin who plays police officer Andy Simpson. He’s also the owner of Clovis, a cat who happens to be the natural enemies of the Sleepwalkers.
There’s lots of cats in Sleepwalkers, which is hinted at with the inbreeding we see between Charles and his mother. As I said before: "Ew!". When in his Sleepwalker form Charles looks like a reject from Whoville, the effects look that bad. There are some other effects, like bitten off fingers and such that are slightly better effects but they can’t make up for the hilarious character effects used on Charles and his mother. This is only slightly better than some previous King/Garris I have seen. I’ll scrape together three “Cop Kabobs” out of five. It almost falls into that “So bad it’s great” category but not quite. Maybe it needs to be more bad to be that good. Huh?
That's not true!!!! You're a liar! Toonces was NOT a stuffed cat!!! Toonces was REAL!!!!!
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, I haven't seen this since we saw it in da theatre (theater number 4?!?!?! You can't remember that! You made that up!) and never watched it since. There are only 3 things I remember about SLEEPWALKERS: #1) Enya's song "Boadicea" was used in it, #2) When Fink saw the cat colony we once had in our yard lying about sunning themselves, he said it my yard looked like STEPHEN KING'S SLEEPWALKERS and #3) the movie pretty much sucked.
I too had not seen it since we saw it at Amc Marlton 8 theater. Theater #4! I did make it up but when the lie is better than the story you go with the lie! I didn't remember the Enya song until I re-watched it. That picture at the beginning of the post was from your yard not the movie so yeah, your yard was a living breathing version of Sleepwalkers! Here's the thing the movie does mostly suck BUT I was entertained so there's that. I probably scored it too high though.
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