End-of-year reviews: Forgotten, underperformed, overshadowed, and/or under-the-radar films over the decades – Part 6
A mother and son hiding a dark supernatural secret unleash horror in a small town where cats are the only creatures that can stop them.
Very much flawed, deeply uneven, and yet oddly enjoyable. Escaping the coming-of-age theme (see previous reviews), Sleepwalkers is a film with more holes than Swiss cheese: over-the-top acting, wildly inconsistent pacing and rhythm, and narrative logic that collapses under even the gentlest scrutiny. And yet, it’s precisely the kind of film you forgive for all of it.
Written by Stephen King and directed by Mick Garris, Sleepwalkers never pretends to be anything more than it is. It doesn’t take itself seriously – and neither should you. The premise is somewhere between outrageous and laughable: shape-shifting cat people who are lethally afraid of cats, who can make themselves (and objects) disappear, who casually change car brands mid-scene, and who engage in incest without the film ever fully processing how unhinged that idea actually is. The film throws absurdity at the screen with such commitment that resistance feels pointless.
There is a very specific charm to how Sleepwalkers operates. Despite being released in the early ’90s, it feels firmly stuck in the ’80s – a time when B-movies thrived on illogical plotting, inexplicably unstoppable villains, and rules that changed whenever the story needed them to – the villain never runs, yet always stays ahead of the victim (rings a bell?).
Sleepwalkers doesn’t aim to scare; it aims to entertain. Its pleasures lie in excess, and in watching a film fully commit to its own nonsense – oh, and how amazing Mädchen Amick and Alice Krige look. The performances are broad, the mythology is gloriously unstable, and the rules of the world are rewritten on the fly. There’s fun in spotting how little the film cares about plausibility – as long as it keeps moving.
This is safe, harmless escapism. Not horror that unsettles, but horror that amuses. A relic of a time when genre cinema could be unapologetically silly, shamelessly indulgent, and completely unconcerned with coherence. Sleepwalkers may not be good by conventional standards – but it is entertaining, and sometimes, especially at the end of the year, that’s more than enough.
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