Sleepwalkers

Better call animal control, because it’s CATS VS. DOGS MONTH at Mondo Mondays, featuring hilarious hordes of crazed canines and killer kitties battling it out for bad movie domination! May the best species win…

“They Feast on Your Fear … and it’s Dinner Time!” Stephen King goes completely bonkers with this baffling, perversely warped tale of monsters, incest and rampaging kitty cats that gives Maximum Overdrive a run for its money in the “did King actually write this?” horror movie sweepstakes! Sleepwalkers, the first Stephen King screenplay written, as the posters awkwardly put it, “expressly for the scream,” follows the bloody misadventures of a half-human, half-cat race of shapeshifters called, for no apparent reason, sleepwalkers. Hunky high schooler Charles (Brian Krause, Charmed) and his incestuous mother, Mary (Alice Krige, Star Trek: First Contact) are the sleepwalkers in question, a dwindling species of ancient human/feline creatures who can shapeshift and can only be harmed by cats, who can see what they truly are. After wreaking havoc in a seaside California town, the WAY too close mother and son team have relocated to the small town of Travis, Indiana, where they acquire a nice house and false identities. Unfortunately, the sleepwalkers need to feed on the lifeforce of virgins to survive (naturally!) and have fixated on innocent local high schooler and movie theater employee Tanya (Madchen Amick, Twin Peaks). While Tanya is being wooed into becoming the sleepwalkers’ next virgin meal, Charles mutates from teen golden boy to savage werecat in a football jersey, and as the tension mounts and the bodies pile up, the town’s tabbies gather together for a final, feline-fueled showdown with the monsters in their midst. Filled with gore, elaborate latex make-up effects and bizarre humor, Sleepwalkers is dumb fun and a shockingly clumsy horror flick from director Mick Garris, featuring cameos by Tobe Hooper, Joe Dante, Clive Barker, John Landis, and yes, even Stephen King himself. (Dir. by Mick Garris, 1991, USA, 91 mins., Rated R)