Sleepwalkers Review

Sleepwalkers
A ravenous mother and son are the last of the sleepwalkers. They are creatures who prey off virgin's blood and can shift shapes to take the form of catlike beasts. When a teenage girl escapes his grasp and runs for help, the hunt begins for the savage pair who are only vulnerable to a scratch from a cat.

by Angie Errigo |
Published on
Release Date:

01 Jan 1992

Running Time:

85 minutes

Certificate:

18

Original Title:

Sleepwalkers

Sleepwalkers. Steven King's first original screenplay, is horror filmmaking by numbers. It has monster fiends, a few swooshing tracking shots, many a touch lifted from every self-respecting vampire movie ever made, and several weak but intentional laughs to indicate that no one here is taking the thing too seriously.

The duo of the title are shapeshifters, an incestuous mother and son (Krige and Krause), vulnerable only to the scratch of a cat, who turn into gruesome, er, thingies and suck the life force out of virgins. Virgins being rather thin on the ground these days, the pair are simply ravenous by the time the lad meets Tanya (Amick), inexplicably toying with her affections for quite some time before addressing himself to the business of lunch.

The normally serious thespian Alice Krige has little to do initially except prowl the house in a bewildering variety of slinky slips complaining of hunger and seducing her boy in several tedious and distasteful sex scenes.

Finally, however, she is unleashed for a sick-making, bloody rampage notable for the film's only original touch — the impaling of a victim on an cob of corn.

Meanwhile, in a very Hitchcock/TV whipped cream advert kind of a way, the local cat population gathers on the lawn to get their own back for past sins. If they could speak, eight out of ten of them would doubtless concur that this is a dog.

Gore aplenty, but, unforgivably, there is scarcely a genuine fright nor a clever thrill in the entire movie.
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