October 3 - Sleepwalkers

Well, I can only hope there are more horror flicks on TV the closer we get to Halloween because honestly, it's only the third day of the month and I am having a hell of a time finding horror on TV. Seriously, we need an all-day, all-night Horror Channel, because I'd just watch it forever and end up an old, dessicated corpse just staring at the TV in endless joy. Of course, given the nature of the horror channel, I'd probably still be alive somehow, and anyone who found my freeze-dried corpsicle would be quickly devoured and used as a between-movie snack.

Today I turned to the internet, specifically to crackle.com. And before I go any further, it occurs to me I should probably get a subscription to Netflix or something so I can actaully find horror movies to watch the rest of the month. I'm not sure why I didn't think of it sooner. Oh well, anyway, I found Sleepwalkers on crackle.com, and despite the commercials for Saw The Neverending Story that pop up every 15 minutes or so (literally, the same damn commercial every 15 minutes) I watched the whole movie almost without interruption. Except right near the end I got sleepy and had to take an afternoon nap. Hey, I am old now, these things happen to people over the age of 39.

Sleepwalkers is an older movie, written by Stephen King (who could apparently sneeze on a napkin in a diner and have movie studios fight over the rights to turn it into a movie, not that this one isn't good), and is dated all the way back to 1992. We start out with a nasty little murder scene on the west coast, with Mark Hamill as the sherriff of Bodega Bay, California, investigating what turns out to be the life-sucking murder of a young schoolgirl. But Mark isn't on screen for very long, and instead we switch to someplace in indiana, or illinois, I don't know, one of those I states. So small town I-something life gets a new student at school, played by Brian Krause, who's been doing horror for ages and even took a turn as the handyman/husband of piper on Charmed. Here he plays a Sleepwalker, a shape-shifting race of immortal cat-people, who's come to town with his mommy to make a fresh start of things. So we quickly learn that old Brian and his mommy, beautifully portrayed by Alice Krige, have a, shall we say, extremely close relationship. I know Alice is supposed to play scary in this movie, and frankly she does an awesome job of it, but she looks so thin and toned in this movie that even if she was my mommy I might do her myself. The scenes where she's moping about the house waiting for her son to bring home dinner, or looking all hungry and shit while she's waiting for her son to get down to business so she can eat and leave, just really show off how she looks in a housedress.

Anyway, Sleepwalkers takes eat-and-run to a whole other level, because basically, they need to steal the life force from a human being to survive, and since that results in the death of the human being, they usually need to elave town pretty fast afterwards. Oh they eat normally enough, but I guess they don't live too long if they don't feed on life energy very often, and what's worse is, poor mommy can't survive at all unless her son steals the life-force first, and then passes it on to her. Which, really sucks for her, because Brian is not on his best game, here. I really hope for the sake of the rest of the Sleepwalkers that mommy can feed by herself again once the kid is old enough or something, because otherwise, you'd think the species would have died out centuries ago.

So Brian takes his sweet time finding an appropriate virgin (yes, it has to be a virgin for some reason) in the new school he's at, while poor mommy is at home clawing at the walls with hunger pangs, and eventually selects this poor girl who dances really well while vacuuming. There's a few quick scenes of him taking out a too-curious teacher and avoiding the law while burning rubber on the highways, and then it's off to Homeland cemetary to do some gravestone rubbings. Rubbing out, more likely, is what's on Brian's mind, since he tries to steal the life right out of the poor girl. Let me just take a minute to say, Brian almost seems like the virgin in this movie, because the girl (I keep wanting to say played my Madchen Amick but I am not sure... checking IMDB.com, I see that I am right, woohoo!) seems like she is practically having to seduce him instead of the other way around, and isn't that always the best way to seduce someone? Let them think they are seducing you? Anyway, things are going swimmingly well at first, they are kissing and then the life force is getting sucked out and you'd think monsters would totally get the hang of this by now, but nope, you'd be wrong. They never seem to get that humans fight back and you really need to knock them out or something before you really get your freak on, you know what I'm saying? So little Madchen fights back, which really doesn't help much because the sleepwalkers are damn near unkillable despite what you do to them, but it lets her escape and run off to a passing policeman. This, also wouldn't be much of a problem, becuase bullets don't seem to do shit to these guys, but wait, the COP HAS A CAT! And, for some damn reason, he takes it with him in his patrol car. Yea. Everywhere he goes, I guess. I don't know, I think the patrol car would stink of used kitty litter after a long day, but wtf do I know? But, apparently sleepwalkers are deathly afraid of cats, and for good reason. CAT SCRATCH FEVER, BABY!!!!! Yea, literally. Apparently cat's claws start sleepwalkers on FIRE. Yea, ouchies. The cat assaults old Brian and claws the shit out of him and Brian takes off and leaves the girl still alive, and while he runs home to mommy, the whole police force comes out to protect her and track Brian down.

Now here's the awesome part, Ron Perlman is in this movie! Yea, for all of 5 minutes, but he heads over to the house to question the girl about the "attempted rape" they are calling it, because they of course don't believe her story about him not being human, and who would? As Ron Perlman says, she needs a good slap on the ass and if her mommy and daddy won't do it, he'll be happy to volunteer. So anyway, Ron heads to the house where the girl is recovering and runs into Alice Krige! Oh shit! Yea, well, see, Brian's damn near dead and she's starving and the only way she can feed is to get life-breath from a virgin, through Brian, and the only virgin in town that she knows of is... you guessed it, poor little madchen. So Alice heads to her house, takes out her family and half the damn police force, drags madchen out of the house by her hair and runs into Ron "Hellboy" Perlman. I'd like to say the fight was a no-holds barred slugfest but Alice rips through him like tissue paper, she literally bites his fingers off while he's pointing at her and then snaps his gun arm at the elbow and fucking beats him unconscious with it. Yea. This bitch is BAD-ASS.

Well, i don't want to give away the whole movie, despite having done just that very thing, but I'll leave the ending for you to experience yourself. Let me just say that sleepwalkers, especially old starving ones, are not something you want to mess with. There is no nudity in this film, but Alice can work a house dress better than any human being I have ever seen, and there is precious little music in this movie, but what there is is excellent. There's a spooky little ditty that runs through the movie, some old song the mom loves that she keeps playing over and over and over, and a short scene where madchen is using a vacuum cleaner and dancing to a rock tune, and that's it, but it's all done very well.

Definitely one to watch, despite having seen it multiple times, I always enjoy this movie. Stephen King, Tobe Hooper and Clive Barker all make appearances at the clean-up scene at the graveyard, so look out for that. The only one I recognized was stephen king, and seriously, I could trip over the dead bodies of the other two and not have any clue who they were, so either their makeup was awesome or they look like really normal people.

I've decided for the rest of this month, only to review movies that I have either not seen before or that I know I'll like, to avoid a repeat of the Halloween 2 post from yesterday. Watching bad horror movies and whining about it is no way to go through life. Or so I've heard.