Subject: REVIEW: SLEEPWALKERS

From: [email-masked] (The Phantom)
Date: 15 Apr 92 14:43:50 GMT

[Followups directed to rec.arts.movies.  -Moderator]

			      SLEEPWALKERS
		    A review in the public domain
			    by The Phantom
                           ([email-masked])

     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
: [email-masked]
: cmcl2!panix!sbb