King's Highway pt. 51: The Shining (mini-series)

Stephen King has never made a secret about his distaste for two things: being asked where his ideas come from, and Stanley Kubrick's version of his novel The Shining. When speaking to Playboy in the early 1980s, here's what he had to say:

"...Kubrick is a very cold man - pragmatic and rational - and he had great difficulty conceiving even academically of the supernatural."

First, let me say that if there's anyone in the world whose opinion I'll listen to on how the book failed to materialize onscreen in the Kubrick version, it's King. I have a lot of sympathy for his viewpoint. The movie guts much of what makes his novel his novel; I've argued elsewhere it's just part of the book-to-film process (and I still believe this) but it's easy to see where King's coming from. He wrote the thing, for crying out loud. Still, this statement has always puzzled me. Isn't Kubrick's The Shining a definitive illustration of the supernatural "conceived academically?" 

I can even see it being said dismissively of the film. (Though I don't think that's how King means it. Ironically, the version he adapted for the screen himself / the subject of this blog is very much an "academic" conception of the supernatural.)

Just saying, for better or worse, if there is a mathematical equation of "the supernatural rendered academically," it would describe Kubrick's The Shining, right down to his use of set design to convey the "wrong" geometric angles and proportions, etc.

But what makes King's statement even more puzzling to me is that if his beef with the movie is Kubrick's "inability" to warmly-convey the supernatural... how does bringing Mick Garris in as director improve the situation?

Before he directed the Shining mini-series from King's script, Garris brought both The Stand and Sleepwalkers to the screen. Do either of these scream "Master of Humanizing the Supernatural" to you? I suppose a case could be made for "personal taste," here, but this is like bringing a (legally unsound to begin with) case all the way to the Supreme Court and hiring Lionel Hutz to argue it.
 

Not that Garris doesn't have his defenders. Go to the threads of The Shining mini-series at the SK Forum for evidence of that. Or consider this enthusiastic blogger's take on Garris's visual style: "He has a very unique way of doing things, and it is evident when you are watching one of his films. He has such a talent for using music over scenes and making it effective. The man can craft so much from his visuals and he lets them tell the story, which is a great talent to have and I love him for it."

I gotta tell you - it disturbs me to read this. It's just... so off on so many points. I don't know where to begin.

Let's look at one example from The Shining. King's script flips the first and second chapters of his novel so that Jack's interview with Ullman takes place after Jack meets with Bill Watson (played by Pat Hingle). The camera (as accompanied by propagandist scoring) swoops over people playing "Denver Croquet" (more on that when I get to King's script) and moves across the lawn, showing the Overlook and the exiting guests. So far, so good. Then, it swings in so we have a moving shot of Jack and Stu talking, coming with them down the stairs and ending on this:

What is the point of this framing? The camera movement calls attention to itself as much as anything in Kubrick's version, but without any of the rationale. They are framed so that the Overlook has come between them. Is this really effective subtext for this scene? Or for anything that follows? Why even bother? 

Garris shares the curious opinion his fans have about his filmography and approach: "The Shining is one of my favorite things I've ever done. First of all, the production values, we were in one place for most of it. Well, a couple of places - a stage, a hotel. So, I was able to really use some filmmaking that I wasn't (able to) in the The Stand. The Stand was guerrilla filmmaking, and I everything I could, but we were rushed and on a much tighter budget with so many locations and so much cast that we were trying to just get it and put as much art into it as possible. But in the case of The Shining, I was able to really build some dread. I think that some of the filmmaking in there was much more sophisticated in the like."

There's so much wrong in that paragraph/ perspective I don't know where to begin. (The Stand is guerrilla filmmaking?) I'll just stick with "building some dread." The most noticeable aspect of The Shining mini-series is its absolute lack of dread. Who on earth could possibly be moved to dread from watching this version of the story?

He also displays a troubling lack of understanding of how deals are routinely made in Hollywood when discussing getting the rights to make this:

"...Part of the deal was that Kubrick had the rights. Kubrick got paid a lot of money for the rights to that. He got a million and a half bucks for the rights for us to do this. And part of the Kubrick’s deal was that King could not say anything critical about his movie…"

I have heard that before re: "King can't bad-talk the movie," but I strongly suspect that's BS. I have no evidence of it either way, but until I hear Kubrick's side (which seems impossible, him being dead and all) I don't buy it. But yes, Kubrick paid a lot of money for the rights to the film, those rights appreciated in value, he got paid an amount commiserate with this. Is that underhanded? Or anything but routine?  It might seem weird to someone not in the business, maybe, but it certainly sounds like standard business practice. Maybe Garris is just bitching about the money eating into his production budget. Whatever. Disney/ ABC has deep pockets.

One more thing before I move on to casting/ the script. As Karina Wilson noted in her book-to-movie-to-mini-series review: "It takes most of Episode One for the Torrances to get settled in to the Overlook, they don't get snowed in until partway through Episode Two, and Jack doesn't get anything but tetchy until Episode Three. Proceedings aren't helped by cheesy 90s special effects (the CGI topiary animals are particularly laughable...

Indeed they are.

The decision to make them actually move rather than suggest movement/ dread with photography is so baffling to me.

As it is, onscreen, it's like being menaced by slow-moving, choppy broccoli.

"...and low-grade Halloween make-up on the ghosts (which looks comic on a modern HDTV."

It looked comic on my shitty-old-TV-from-1997, as well.

I mean, come on.

Karina continues, "King wanted to shoot interiors and exteriors at the location that inspired him - The Stanley Hotel. While it's interesting to see the original, an actual physical location often has disadvantages over a specially-constructed set. A corridor is just a corridor. Unfortunately, from the opening moments, the fancy wedding cake architecture of The Stanley is too pretty to be sinister, lacking the low-lying menace of the Timberline Lodge in Oregon used by Kubrick. And the interiors... were never going to live up to Roy Walker's custom-designed sets."

Lets' move on from Garris and get back to King, who shares an equal amount of blame for this. (And if I seem too snarky, I apologize - God knows I love and support the man's work, nor am I"out to get" Mick Garris. But having watched all agonizing what-felt-like-fifty-five hours of this for the purpose of writing this blog, I at least earned the right to a little snark. Life is short.) Again, from his Playboy interview:

"(Kubrick) used to make transatlantic calls to me from England at odd hours of the day and night, and I remember once he rang up and asked, 'Do you believe in God?' I thought a minute and said, 'Yeah, I think so.' Kubrick replied, 'No, I don't think there is a God' and hung up. Not that religion has to be involved in horror, but a visceral skeptic such as Kubrick just couldn't grasp the sheer inhuman evil of the Overlook Hotel... This was the basic flaw. Because he couldn't believe, he couldn't make the film believable to others."

First, it is worth noting that King's story of these transatlantic calls/ Kubrick's questions has changed over the years. YouTube clips abound of King telling other variations of it, but usually it's that Kubrick called to say any tale that suggests an afterlife is fundamentally optimistic and that King responded "What about Hell?" and Kubrick said "I don't believe in Hell." Kind of a big difference/ implication in those two versions, if you ask me. But as with the rights-thing, Kubrick's side of the story is unfortunately not preserved.

Second, I agree that religion, whether God or the afterlife-in-general, need not be involved to make effective horror, but I'm not exactly sure what Kubrick is an alleged skeptic of, here. The supernatural itself? But Kubrick's film is such overwhelming evidence that the supernatural can be conveyed by a "visceral skeptic" and that audiences believed it, easily. Ask your parents. 

Or ask mine! "We believed it," say Dona and Farrell McMillan.

The horrors of the novel share some key (one might say "the essential") borderlands with the horrors of the film, like some unholy Venn diagram, but they are offspring of different fathers, to be sure. So... again, Mick Garris? That's your solution? I mean, like him or hate him, his filmography simply doesn't merit him as the expert witness for the rebuttal King has in mind, here. Put another way, I like Jack Nicholson as an actor, but I wouldn't cast him as Nelson Mandella.

Also, for what it's worth, Garris is an atheist, i.e. the kind of skeptic King intimates about Kubrick, here. Which I wouldn't even mention - hey, more power to you/ atheists-everywhere, I don't care or think it has to have any bearing on how you direct - but since King brought it up, I mean, what is he seeing in Garris's work to persuade him Garris is a "believer?" It makes me wonder if King is even capable, I'm afraid, of properly evaluating these things when he says things like this.

Still, like I mentioned before, I do sympathize with where King is coming from on Kubrick's movie, so let's continue:

"The second problem was in characterization and casting. Jack Nicholson, though a fine actor, was all wrong for the part. His last big role was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and between that and his manic grin, the audience automatically identified him as a loony from the first scene. But the book is about Jack Torrance's gradual descent into madness."

Far be it from me to disagree with the guy who created Jack Torrance, but... I'm going to. And sometimes, that's reasonable; a proud mother holding up her child's painting probably shouldn't be on the committee that decides whether or not it belongs in the Louvre.

As I mentioned last time, I think Nicholson's casting is if-not-perfect, then so close to it that the difference isn't worth mentioning. King underestimates the "angry dry drunk" aspect of his own creation. Jack Torrance is introduced as close-to-snapping from the very first, and we see him struggle with it. Most teachers don't attack their students and break their child's arm; these things alone mark him as borderline. Kubrick/ Nicholson picking up on that and translating it to screen simply shouldn't provoke these concerns. That they do is truly weird to me. Tho, perhaps understandable... he himself has said, "Alcoholics build defenses the way the Dutch build dikes," and since he's also on record as saying "I'm the guy who wrote The Shining without even realizing I was writing about myself," I think I see some denial in this comment (repeated over the years, but again from his Playboy interview, which, I should note, he gave while slamming beers back, as noted by the interviewer.)

But, okay. That's from where I'm sitting, and we're talking about from where King's sitting, right? So, his answer was (to paraphrase his own wording) to get... Brian Hackett from Wings? i.e. "though a fine actor, someone whose last big role was the smirking-other-male-lead on a laughtrack-sitcom, instantly recognizable to the audience of the time?"

My friend Mark cracked me up by saying they should have got the whole Wings cast for this mini-series. That would have been something. Particularly if Thomas Haden Church has played Danny and David Schramm played Tony.

Granted, King's first choice was Tim Daly, i.e. the other male lead from Wings. Let me just say - I was surprised in this re-watch to discover Weber's performance was actually better than I remembered. He never sells the "descent into madness" King mentions, but that's not really his fault. Garris and King structure the mini-series in such a plodding takes-forever-to-get-places way that by the time Weber "snaps," it's just very fake, very Lifetime-movie-esque.

(Need proof? Watch the very beginning of this scene, or from 2:19 through 3:27 of this.)

Visually-designing the story as an ill-conceived rebuttal to Kubrick's film was bad enough. (And no matter what Garris/ King say, it certainly comes across that way. It's like Ray Manzarek's version of The Doors story - it might be closer to what he thinks/ knows about "what really happened," but Stone's version is a film, utilizing every aspect of the filmmaking process; Manzarek's is not.) Adding awful CGI and make-up further ruined it. But the unbelievable amount of time given to "dramatic tension" scenes between Jack and Wendy (which never once seem dramatic; in fact, Wendy never seems terrified of Jack at all, even after he snaps, and Courtland Mead is just playacting. Tough to criticize child actors, I know, but the difference between Danny's terror in Kubrick's movie and in Garris/King's version is very, very great.) and establishing Jack as "not a bad guy" and basically giving him a few too many hours to not be intimidating makes the transition something sub-par to Discovery ID crime-scene re-enactments.

Ironically, in real-life, Weber's passive-aggressive, barely-concealed rage on Real Time with Bill Maher or his angry snaps to people on Twitter suggest the casting for the dry-drunk/ out-of-control part of Jack Torrance wasn't so far off. Too bad he didn't have a script/ direction to help him focus. Without it, I'm afraid, his theatrics come off as just bad / unbelievable. Particularly everytime he bellows "COME TAKE YOUR MEDICINE" or "MIND YOUR FATHER."

As someone noted somewhere (again, forgive my lack of citations - lost my notes) it has the effect of watching an episode of The Flintstones where Fred suddenly starts playacting-crazy. The main difference between Weber's performance and Nicholson's is, if Nicholson is too-crazy from the get-go, he is genuinely intimidating; Weber is neither. Though there are glimpses of what-might-have-been.

King's script is definitely a huge part of the problem. It is simply a novel ill-transposed to screen. Novels require the kind of compartmentalization Kubrick and Diane Johnson performed (or any other number of examples); none is on display here. Characters spend four minutes saying what should be expressed in ten seconds, far too much time is spent on nothing-things, (like explaining the rules of Denver Croquet. Really? First of all, it's roque in the novel; why change it? Particularly something that also has no bearing on anything except putting the mallet in Jack's hand?) and R-rated material is shoehorned into PG sensibilities: all of which ensures it comes across as a very-special-episode of Beverly Hills 90210.

How about the other performances? Some aren't bad.

Probably among the best things Rebecca DeMornay ever did, although I prefer Shelly Duvall's palpable-terror/ suffering-mother-archetype. Still, "AT LEAST SHE WAS BLONDE!" as someone wrote - yes, in all-caps - on the SK Forum.

Courtland Mead is awful. As Film Threat noted, "(He's) a sitcom-kid. He's acting for the camera. He knows it, and more importantly, we can see it. It's just little things like the tone and volume of his voice or the way he looks at the other actors. It's a dead giveaway." Particularly in any of the "Why are Mommy and Daddy fighting?" scenes. I know, he's just a kid and all, but... so was Danny Lloyd, right? The difference between directors is at volume ten, here.

The less said about Tony, the better:

Particularly the God-awful decision to have him float like this, or this tacked-on ending where Danny is graduating from high school, as-smiled-upon by Dick Halloran and his mother in the audience, as well as a ghostly-end-of-Jedi-ghost of Jack Torrance:

Holy dear God in heaven and/or Hell.

And Elliot Gould has given some fine performances over the years, to be sure, (I for one grew up with The Devil and Max Devlin and enjoy his take on Philip Marlowe in Altman's The Long Goodbye) but his turn as Stu Ullman is bad with a capital "B."

He over-enunciates each and every letter of every word he delivers as if he's trying to make sure his granddaughter in the back-row can hear Grandpa "play make-believe."

Some of the cameos are fun, particularly Frank Darabont as one of the ghosts (a screen-shot of which I couldn't find, unfortunately), or

Sam Raimi as the gas station attendant who gives Dick the snowcat, or

King as bandleader of the "Gage Creed Orchestra"

But ultimately, this whole mess belongs in the same discussion as George Lucas's alterations to the original Star Wars trilogy. Both the novel and Kubrick's version of it are masterpieces, pure and simple; this Garris/ King version of the same tale is like Greedo-firing-first for five-and-a-half damn hours.

NEXT:

Misery

King's Highway pt. 39: Bag of Bones

OOPS. I checked my trail guide and realized I skipped Desperation and The Regulators. Damn, I'll have to circle back to those after-the-fact. If I may abuse my Dark Tower National Park and Wildlife Reserve conceit, these trails were temporarily closed for maintenance/ due to bear attacks. I also want to get the two hardcovers with the connected-covers, and neither of my local shops have those. So, two for the proverbial rainy day, sometime before the end of the Highway. "Everything's Eventual" will be covered next time, though.

Okay, let's start with the book itself.

"Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones."- attributed to Thomas Hardy.

I think this is a well-written, well-plotted, well-paced, richly characterized work, but when Maddie mentions (on pg. 467) that she suspects her daughter might have psychic insight, I surrendered to the nagging feeling that I'd been served another casserole of stock-King ingredients. I don't mean to make too much of it. One, I enjoyed it (and, to continue the metaphor, well, he's feeding me and all, so I'd feel a bit like a dinner guest criticizing the menu when no one asked me to sit down in the first place); two, it's not something unique to King - all writers tend to mine similar material, over time; and three, King is certainly aware of this tendency on his part and plays around with it. 

So, not that it really bothered me, but does any of this sound familiar? A grieving writer (Mike Noonan) returns to rural Maine (his cabin at Dark Score Lake, called Sara Laughs), forms a psychic bond with a child, receives supernatural assistance via dreams, bangs his head against the taciturn natives, and then uncovers the source of the supernatural trauma (the rape and murder of the namesake of his cabin, a woman from the town's past). A whopper of a storm pounds the town as things are wrapping up, and then all lingering questions are mopped up to a peripheral buddy-character in the last ten to twenty pages. 

Regardless, this is quite an enjoyable book. It's interesting to speculate what people would make of this one were it the only book King ever published. My guess is it would be hailed as a masterpiece from quarters that normally don't praise King's work. I'm not sure where it fits in to my own personal rankings (but I look forward to that; that comes after the Highway is fully traversed, so, ye lovers-of-lists, make a note on your calendar)

 Couple of notes: 

- There may be a bit too much about Mike's erections; I mean, seriously. If that's your thing, you're in for a treat. (The only thing missing was him comically knocking things off the table with it as he tried to get around Sara Laughs. In fact, that may even have happened once or twice.) I have a joke that would be perfect here, but damn it, our trail guide Bryant Burnette beat me to it... but I'll link to that later.

- Some of King's difficulty in portraying well-rounded non-white characters comes into play here. Unless you think every black person ends each and every sentence with "Sugar."

- Much was made of the pre-publication history of this novel. (As discussed here, among other places.) The short version is, King parted ways with Viking after 17 years and 44 titles, over money; Bag of Bones was his first book with Simon & Schuster, with whom he still publishes. Viking, it is said, balked at his asking price for Bag of Bones, something he laments in On Writing, which is too bad. In general, I think King is often too nice of a guy for his own good. I think people hear things like, "He wanted $17 million and 50% of the profits" and think Oh, here we go; greedy-ass writers/ prima donnas... without taking into account how many people get rich off the labor of artists who in no way contributed anything to the process. Like John Lennon said about the Beatles early career, "We held on to as much of it as we could, but we made a lot of millionaires along the way," i.e. guys in suits with MBAs who get chunks of the publishing/ syndication. Numerous examples abound. (Can you believe long-retired/ only-barely-connected producers still get residuals on All in the Family reruns? It seems criminal.) Anyway, on this score, my sympathies lie 100% with the artist. Particularly when said artist is a writer, without whom... (Along these lines, I quite enjoyed the glimpses behind-the-publishing-world-scenes in the first hundred pages.)

- As for the Dark Tower connection, i.e. how we ended up on this trail at this point in time:

- From the Dark Tower wiki: 'Bag of Bones features a house named Sara Laughs. This house is the Twinner of Cara Laughs, the house on Turtleback Lane that was the center of the walk-in activity. By extension, Mike Noonan is also the Twinner of Stephen King, both being writers who own a summer house name Sara/Cara Laughs.' And lest you ask, I'm not sure what some of that means, either. While reading, I assumed the connections were to The Outsider (the malevolent being that seized upon Sara Tidwell's rage to piggyback its own evildoings) and to...

- The Green Lady (i.e. that tree, there). I thought this might relate to The Green Man from Insomnia, who helped our protagonists in that story, as it helps our protagonist in this one. (Green Man? Crimson King? Power of the White? The Man in Black? Cuckoo for Color Motifs!)

- King mentions in the afterword, "Hope this gave you one sleepless night." Did anyone anywhere get scared sleepless from this? I'm not knocking its "scare" elements, just seemed an odd novel on which to hang that particular sentiment. It's more literary fiction than horror, for me. Perhaps I'm too jaded when it comes to horror. The last work of horror to upset my sleep was The Shining back in junior high, and I'll save all attendant-anecdotes for when I get to that one.

- As per usual, Kev has a fantastic review out there. Just wanted to quote this part: "Perhaps more than in any other novel, Bag of Bones is rife with symbolic names. Mike Noonan's maid is Brenda Me-serve and his handyman is Bill-Dean ("building"). Mattie's evil father-in-law is Max Devore - an echo of devour - and two of his emissaries are George Footman and Rogette Whitmore (King is adamant about pronouncing her name with a hard g, making her a rogue in the feminine). Rather than merely being a playful detail, both the extent and obviousness of symbolic names are actually clues. Names are of vital importance to the deeper mysteries of Bag of Bones." I didn't catch any of that; well-played, Sai King.

 - There are a hell of a lot sponge-worthy passages/ turns-of-phrase in this one:

'Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.' (pg. 94)

'Things conceived by minds and made by hands can never quite be the same, even when they try their best to be identical, because we're never the same from day to day or even moment to moment.' (pg. 109)

'My first editor used to say that eighty-five percent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business, a sentiment I've never believed should be restricted to writers. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it's generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That's blue-collar labor down there, non-union guys with lots of muscles and tattoos. Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort.' (pg. 245)

'Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive - minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.' (pg. 317) (Low Men in Yellow Coats?)

'This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time... We turn from all we know, all we fear. We study catalogs, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT-and-T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightning flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.' (pg. 361)

(on writing) 'It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile.' (pg. 384)

'The muggy, smutchy look of mid-July was gone; the sky was that deep sapphire shade which is the sole property of October.' (pg. 492. 'Smutchy' is perfect, sort of like when he nails the sound a Polaroid makes as it spits out its image as 'squidgey' in The Sun Dog.)

'I could see through him, but I could also see into him: the rotting remains of his tongue in his mouth, his eyes in their sockets, his brain simmering like a spoiled egg in its case of skill. Then he was gone, and there was nothing but one of those swirling dust-helixes.' (pp. 647-648)

'One eye popped; a dripping yellow splinter ran up her nose like a dagger; the scant skin of her forehead split, snapping away from the bone like two suddenly released windowshades. Then the lake pulled her away. I saw her face a moment longer, upturned into the torrential rain, wet and as pale as the light from a flourescent bar. Then she rolled over, her black vinyl raincoat swirling around her like a shroud.' (pp. 707-708)

Whew!

Okay, so there is a film adaptation of this one...

and I have tried to watch it four separate times. I never make it to the end. Luckily, a very entertaining overview and book-to-film comparison already exists at our aforementioned trail guide's site, and I highly recommend any of you who have seen it check it out post-haste. (See if you can find the joke I wanted to use, above - not that it's all that, ahem, hard.) I will say, of what I have seen, it is a very fair takedown of the changes from page to screen. io9 also has a good one. And lest I focus only on the negative, here is one positive review, though I should mention I disagree with just about everything in that one, particularly "He is faithful to the flow of the story, the characters behavior and the tone of the book itself." I couldn't disagree more, on that score. Here are some pics.

Jason Priestley, Matt Frewer, and Pierce Brosnan. I felt bad about my 'Donna Martin Graduates' crack from my Children of the Corn blog, but I also didn't want to erase it, as just typing those words makes me chuckle. So, you get two pics, Mr. Priestley; carry on.

William Schallert (Max Devore) and Anika Noni Rose (Sara Tidwell)

One final note: do answering machines exist anywhere except for in movies, these days? I wonder when that will change. It's a convenient plot device, to be sure, one that has proven quite resistant to the advent of cellphones/ voicemail in the real(er) world. Anyway, it was nice of everyone who left Mike Noonan a message in the movie to leave long-enough pauses for Mike to make comments aloud as he listened to them.

NEXT:

EVERYTHING'S EVENTUAL
and THE LITTLE SISTERS OF ELURIA

King's Highway pt. 19: Sleepwalkers

There's really not all that much to say about Sleepwalkers. Having just watched it, I figured rather than put it off for another blog, let's get this one out of the way. (We'll get back to the Rogue States after this, in case anyone's as OCD as me and breathes a sigh of relief with this disclaimer.)

Directed by Mick Garris (who also did The Stand adaptation, as well as 1997's The Shining) with an original screenplay by Stephen King, this is not a bad installment of your general 80s/ early-90s horror film. I forget who said it, but someone said a decade (ie "the 80s") actually exists a few years into the next one, so what we refer to, say, as "the 60s" is really 1962-1972, "the 70s" is really 1972-1982, and so on. I agree. It holds true for most of the twentieth century, at any rate; beyond that, I'll defer to experts. Anyway, despite its 1992 release date, I'll consider Sleepwalkers as an average-to-not-bad entry in the 80s slasher/ supernatural genre. Like a Tales from the Crypt two-parter or something.

 

It hits most of the hallmark-tropes for either, as recounted ad infinitum elsewhere.

Why isn't it great? No real defining reason - the performances are good, the pacing is fine, the set pieces are more than acceptable. The f/x are dated but who cares. So what is it? Primarily it's the 80s/ Mom jeans and the general progression of the main antagonist (he who drives a shape-shifting/ dimming blue Trans Am into a Mustang and has the incestuous relationship with his Mom i.e whose whole life is sort of a rape-metaphor, if you want to sip some brandy over it.)

All right, I like Buffy fine, so I can hang with this, I guess.

Keep it moving! * Granted, "morphing" was in its infancy as CGI at the time, but this is inelegant, to say the least.

This isn't too bad, but... I mean, that's still a cat-guy under there, right?

 * trademark Dawn Byrd  

In a way, this cat thing was incredibly prescient. A time traveler from the distant past of 1992 who made his or her way to 2012 would go online and think the future was two parts cat pictures and one part porn-and-flesh-parade.

Perhaps it has always been this way, in one form or another.

A topic for another night! Anyway - it's tough enough to get past the 80s jeans, and then there's the cat-people thing, is all I'm saying.

Staying with cats for a second,

this whole movie is a 2012 cat lover's delight. And they're out there. Someone - going by that "Clovis" motivational poster I found, above - is way ahead of me here, but this whole film can be seen as "the Cat Lady's confession."

And there's a fun parallel to Cat's Eye, as well. If you recall, in that movie, the "glue" that binds the three stories is the cat's journey to an eventual home with Drew Barrymore. Whereupon, the cat saves Drew Barrymore from a troll who lives in the wall, who waits until she goes to sleep before pouncing on her chest and trying to suck out her life force. (This stuff is all... calling it Freudian doesn't do it justice.) The same happens here, right down to that slippery-zone between metaphor and strange Pagan relations, and cats saving the day.

I don't mean to make too much of it, with the Freudian/ Pagan relations stuff, just, hey, it's there if you want it.

Alice Krige plays the mother-villain. She first crossed my radar in the film adaptation of SK's sometimes-collaborator Peter Straub's Ghost Story.

Which I did see, back in the 80s (unbeknownst to my parents), but she is perhaps better known to the popgeek-critic-in-my-head as the Borg Queen:

Whether or not the Borg should even have a queen is the Roe vs. Wade of certain segments of the ST: TNG community.

There are a couple of fun cameos. SK, Clive Barker, and Tobe Hooper.

and John Landis:

And finally, I kept trying to figure out why Madchen Amick's parents looked so familiar. I couldn't place them, but once I sat down to write this and looked up a few things, I said Oh, of course:

NEXT: Probably back to the Rogue States. I'm going to take most of August off from the ol' King's Highway, but before I do, we'll get through all the novellas, the "Shawshank"/ Green Mile one, and Cell.