sleepwalkers

Sometime around 1986 (perhaps when Emilio Estevez was shooting a Green Goblin semi-truck with a rocket launcher in Maximum Overdrive) having Stephen King’s name above a movie title stopped being a good thing. A prolific writer, King’s work has a about a 50/50 failure-to-success ratio. Films adapted from the work: perhaps around 80/20. So that fact that 1991’s Sleepwalkers, based on King’s original screenplay, came and went without much cultural impact is probably to be expected.

Yet the fun thing about home video is rediscovering titles you missed, slept through or flat-out ignored. And while Sleepwalkers is certainly no lost classic, there’s more to appreciate than you might think in this story about mother-son shape shifters who share an Oedipal relationship and a strange fear of housecats.

The new kid in town, Charles (Brian Krause), pursues a relationship with the cute girl next door (Twin Peaks’ Madchen Amick). But his intentions are much more mysterious, involving some sort of sacrifice to his mother, Mary (Alice Krige), who is jealous of her son’s high school romance.

Directed by Mick Garris, a horror hanger-on who has ridden the coattails of many others’ success (several of whom have cameos in the film: Clive Barker, Tobe Hooper, John Landis and King himself), Sleepwalkers suffers from his lack of creative vision. The uncomfortably incestuous relationship is handled quite well, with Krige (a classy genre veteran) channeling a bit of Carrie-crazy as the overprotective mother. But somewhere in act two, the tone shifts dramatically, becoming the cheesy / gory horror story you were afraid of in the first place.

Krige comes back around to help salvage the big finale, which involves Ron Perlman, Ferris Bueller’s parents and a herd of cats (trust me, I’m not making this up); just enough to make Sleepwalkers what so many Stephen King adaptations have turned out to be: an interesting failure. Image debuts the film for the first time on Blu-ray with zero extras and a moderately satisfying transfer.