Sleepwalkers (1992)

Directed by Mick Garris. Starring Alice Krige, Brian Krause, Mädchen Amick, Dan Martin, Jim Haynie, Cindy Pickett, Lyman Ward, Glen Shadix, Ron Perlman. [R]

A small, sleepy Midwestern town is disrupted by the arrival of an incestuous mother-son pair of vampiric shapeshifters who feed on virgins and have a severe aversion to felines. Ineptly-made junk from an original script by Stephen King (who also appears briefly as an oddball); purports to take itself seriously as a grim chiller with garbled mythology before several abrupt tonal transitions result in a descent into full-on camp absurdity—after dispatching a bumbling cop with an ear of corn, Krige quips, “No vegetables, no dessert, those are the rules.” Trouble is, whenever it’s not earning derisive snickering, it’s deathly dull. Acting trends toward awful, but Krige at least manages to tread the thin line between lustful and deranged for at least a few early scenes. The ill-defined monsters also have the peculiar ability to “dim” things, which can make objects or people vanish from sight—if only they’d done the same for the movie itself. Directors Joe Dante, John Landis, Tobe Hooper and Clive Barker all cameo; Mark Hamill makes an unbilled appearance in the prologue.

19/100