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 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.
The Highway rambles on! I'm fixing to take a pit-stop at the next service plaza. I started reading "1922" from Full Dark, No Stars earlier, saw it was set in Hemingford Home, Nebraska, and said "Oh, that's next to Gatlin, from 'Children of the Corn.'" Before I knew it, I said out loud...
Probably a good time to take a break, stretch my legs and hit the vending machine. I've got blogs in the incubator for "The Long Walk," the other novellas, and a Shawshank/ Green Mile one; I'll wait til I catch up on those, then hit the road again. Still plenty of asphalt between here and Derry.
I covered a bit of the short story earlier, but the movie arrived from Netflix for this eve so popped it in. I've seen it maybe four or five times over the years. It's one that keeps you coming back but not one you necessarily have to own. The plot: Burt and Vicky take a wrong turn on their cross-country trip and end up in wack-a-doo, NE, where the kids get their marching orders in dreams from some weird-ass thing in the corn, listen to the world's creepiest child, ever, and kill all/any adults/each other, once they come of reaping age...
That this one short story, originally published in Penthouse in 1977, has spawned this cottage industry of sequels and TV remakes that continues to the present day is at the very least remarkable. Of those sequels and remakes, Dawn and I watched the third in the series, Urban Harvest, on TV one sleepy weekend afternoon, (THE CORN COMES TO CHICAGO!) and some or most of the SyFy remake with Kandyse McClure, which hewed a little closer to the original story but was not particularly "fun." The original 80s version, tho, directed by Fritz Kiersh, is still fun.
Like "Trucks," it expands the original material quite a bit in its sublimation from story to screen, Back-story and new sequences are added, but nothing that really seems out of place or un-suggested by the source material. Unlike Maximum Overdrive, though, it adds the narration, forgotten after the middle of the movie, of a small boy, one of the Gatlin kids, who yearns to escape. I'm always wary of narration - particularly when it isn't consistent or disappears midway through - and prefer the p.o.v. to be more story-driven. The p.o.v. and plot, here, stay close to your traditional 80s slasher narrative (questionable decisions and exposition and pursuit punctuating kill-set-pieces). SK wrote an original draft for the screenplay, but the studio opted for this one. Considering its longevity in the straight-to-video and TV film market, I guess it was a profitable decision.
One more tiii-iiiime!!
The most notable difference from story-to-screen is probably the relationship between the married couple. Also, Burt becomes an emergency room surgeon in the movie - I kept waiting for that to be useful somewhere down the road in the film, but if it was, I missed it. Burt might as well have been a stunt double for Jackie Chan films, for all the good his profession served the plot. Maybe they were going for that Emergency Room Surgeon demographic.
The music is fun. That choral/chant "Saaaaataani-coooooo-us" sort of score, with 80s synth here and there.
Doesn't look all that different! This is from a blog series devoted exclusively to the movie.
Time travel moment - before I'd ever seen it, circa 1986 or so, I'll never forget my buddy Mike Simons rolling his eyes back in his head on the bus or train during a field trip and intoning "He wants you, too, Malachi..."
In casting my nets for this, I came across an interesting interview with Gwabryel, who illustrated this for a book called Knowing Darkness:
The story's main contributions to American folklore seem to be He Who Walks Behind the Rows (I've heard from more than a few European friends who drive across the US heartland that this story is never far from their minds) and "The Blue Man." That last one resonates mainly just with me, I guess, but when I first heard about the Blue Man Group, I immediately pictured a stage-show of skeletal remains in cop uniforms with corn-husk crucifixes towering over the stage.
Still, C of the C, like Cujo, has a weird staying power in the collective unconscious, does it not?
Seeing Peter Horton in this reminded me of Brimstone. Does anyone remember that one?
Hell, does anyone remember Thirtysomething?
It was a guilty pleasure for the few years it was on the air. Sort of like Tru Calling. (Although Brimstone to its eternal discredit did not have Jason Priestley as the Angel of Death:)
All in all, this is a fine entry in whatever genre you want to fit it in. The religious-crazies parable? The couple with the wrong turn to the crazy town in the middle of nowhere? The world as metaphor for violence/ cult of bad relationship drama? (This last, not so much in the 1984 movie but is the main point of the short story/ 2009 SyFy remake, I think) Take your pick. I, for one, was reminded of the Star Trek TOS episodes "Return of the Archons" or "Miri,"
Couldn't decide between "NO BLAH-BLAH-BLAH!!!" or "BONK BONK ON THE HEAD!" so there, both.
As always, there be spoilers ahead; turn back now if such things offend thee.
I saw this trailer before X2 in the theater, if memory serves.
I remember thinking Good lord, that looks a mess... is that one movie or a dozen movies smashed into one?
Both the book and the film (though perhaps more the film) provoke wildly divergent reactions. The garden variety reaction is something like this (and man, do I disagree with just about every word in that, but it's a fair example of the general consensus), but there is also this. I don't necessarily agree with that one, either, but just included it to show the other side of the Dreamcatcher coin in internet-land.
As evidenced by this, as well, which I adore.
The film must have seemed like a slam dunk on paper. Best-selling Stephen King novel? Lawrence Kasdan? (Despite Grand Canyon, he wrote Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Empire Strikes Back, right? Wrong. The failure of this film led to this gap in Kasdan's career. He's lamented it a few times in interviews, which is probably why we don't get a director's commentary on the DVD.) William Goldman? Writer extraordinaire and veteran of other successful King adaptations like Misery and Hearts in Atlantis? And this cast?
"How could we go wrong?" harrumphed the Hollywood fat-cats, who financed this to the tune of 65 million:
How? Two words: Shit Weasel. A lot easier to deal with on the page, and for some it was a shit-weasel too far. The original title of this was Cancer, which Tabitha King wisely talked him out of. I think Dreamcatcher works great - mysterious, apt for the material/ subtext - but I almost wish it was just called Shit Weasel.
Also in the "How" department... Donnie Wahlberg does a good job, actually, but I'm just saying. Maybe if David Cronenberg directed this, it'd have struck the right tones, but tender scenes of childhood juxtaposed to attack helicopters machine-gunning a field of CGI Gray Aliens/ explosions? And suddenly Duddits is Donnie Wahlberg? With light coming out of his mouth?
I actually threw out a few paragraphs of my review once I came out across this.
No point summarizing/ analyzing a movie that has been so hilariously
skewered elsewhere; I can only say "Chapeau." Seek thee elsewhere for anything but personal impressions
from here on out; the AV Club beat me to/ bested me re: any jokes.
Far be it for me to criticize a luminary like William Goldman, but transcription-wise, the film stumbles right out of the gate by compartmentalizing sequences of the novel that only make sense in the third act, reading-wise. Specifically, 1) Duddits-as-realized-dreamcatcher; I mean, they toast him as "their dreamcatcher" in the beginning of the film (even in the freaking trailer), whereas it's an important realization for Henry and Jonesy in the book, and a well-paced one at that. 2) Mr. Gray's possession doesn't come across as intriguingly onscreen, nor does the way he disposes of Pete. (In the book, Mr. Gray manipulates the byrus growing in Pete; in the movie, he turns into a CGI Venus Flytrap and chomps him in two. So, Jonesy's body can now change shape?) 3) The child actors don't do a bad job, but this is sure no Stand By Me. 4) Jonesy's Memory Warehouse is a not-unclever sequence in the film but it nonetheless comes across as too-on-the-nose foreshadowing:
Feel free to skip over the first minute or so; I couldn't find a clip that didn't have the guys at the beginning BS-ing. Roger Ebert singled this clip out as his favorite part of the movie... but also added that he hadn't read the book.
Well, sure, Roger, it's a cool sequence; it can't help but make you think of the ways you store and re-sequence your own memories, and it's a pleasure to watch. But, Jonesy's experiences in the inner sanctum of his memory warehouse (not to mention the reason why he is the successful exception when it comes to being possessed) come across so much more elegantly and "organically" in the novel. (I know "organic" is one of those BS words, these days, but there it is.) Here, it's just another sequence that feels at odds with the sequences around it. Loses its impact as just an info-dump to be exploited later by Mister Gray.
Ahh, Mister Gray.
Jonesy 1: Aren't you the fella whose head exploded back at the Hole in the Wall?
Jonesy 2: Damian Lewis deserves props for his performance, but as mentioned above, Goldman/ Kasdan should have approached his possession much differently. Comes across, again, much better in the reading of it.
One change I did like, tho, (and it's a big one, from the novel to screen) was making Duddits into one of Mister Gray's own for the climax. This alteration gets a lot of "bad press" on the Stephen King Forum for that, but meh. While the emotional impact of the character is far greater in the book (I, for one, cried almost every time Duddits appears in the story), this altered-resolution to Duddits's character arc makes sense to me. Like The Langoliers, perhaps the rest of the adaptation suffers from too rigid a faithfulness to the source material without accurately translating its "vibe," but here, specifically, I'm glad the film charted its own course.
Duddits sees the line. Ooby-Ooby-Doo, where-are-oo? We gah sum urk oo-do-now.
King wrote in On Writing about
how critics never talk about the language in his books (paraphrasing). It's a shame, as he invests as much as any author
noted-for-such in the language. To that end, I assembled some phrases I really liked in the novel and mashed them up. I
tried different combinations of the sentences and my favorite combination is below.
(This may not be to everyone's liking, so my feelings won't be hurt if you skip over this part.)
Change will come upon
them sudden and unannounced, as it always does with children of this age;
if change needed permission from junior-high students, it would cease to
exist.
There is no darkness, not this time; for better or for worse, arc-sodiums have been installed on Memory Lane. But the film is confused, as if the editor took a few too many drinks for lunch and forgot just how the story was supposed to go.
Jonesy's in the hospital with Mister Gray.
BACON IS JUST THE BEGINNING.
Mister Gray is the pain in my brain.
Then he stepped out into the cold.
"Time slowed and reality bent; on and on the eggman went."
Henry believed that all children were presented with self-defining
moments in early adolescence, and that children in groups were apt to
respond more decisively than children alone. Often they behaved badly,
answering distress with cruelty.
Henry and his friends had behaved well,
for whatever reason. It meant no more than anything else in the end,
but it did not hurt to remember... that once, you had confounded the odds
and behaved decently.
Our wickedest motions, in a cosmic sense, come down to no more than counting someone's crib, pegging it backward, then playing dumb about it.
Henry
was crying again. "So long, Beav," he said.
"Love you man and that's straight from the heart."
King writes in the afterward that he wrote all 620 pages of this with just a fountain pen and that "to write the first draft of such a long book by hand put me in touch with the language as I haven't been for years. I even wrote one night (during a power outage) by candlelight. One rarely finds such opportunities in the twenty-first century, and they are to be savored." Amen.
It shows. a) in the above quoted bits, b) in The Beav's dialogue ie. Fuck Me Freddy and Jesus Christ Bananas and He's bald like Telly What's-his-fuck and all of his mantra-like expressions, c) in the military jargon, with its Ripleys and Blue Boys. Along the lines of "c," I like this section:
"Is she a cannibal, Freddy? The person we leave in charge here has got to be a cannibal."
"She eats em raw with slaw, boss."
I should mention the Kurtz aka "Boss," above, is played by Morgan Freeman in the
movie.
"Okay," Kurtz said. "Because this is going to be dirty. I need two Ripley Positives, hopefully Blue Boy guys... Imperial Valley is now a search-and-destroy mission..."The firelight painted Kurtz's brain with byrus, turned his eyes into weasel eyes. "We're going to hunt down Owen Underhill and teach him to love the Lord."
But language or no, this is a novel about a group of boys who do the right thing instead of the cruel thing, and the effect it has on their life. That it incorporates shit-weasels, alien possession, UFOs and Grays, suicide, Maine, and drinking too much is par for the SK course. Maybe I'm just getting too used to walking the links. But part of its power of the whole thing lies in the Lord of the Flies like reality of children in groups, particularly boys. That we all have a Duddits/ dreamcatcher and that we all need that to not turn down the wrong roads makes reality/ safety seem so fragile. And all the more important.
To sum-up, the movie is nowhere near as bad as some would have you believe. It's just one of those like John Carter or Ang Lee's Hulk where people seize upon it as the ultimate example of terrible-ness and never give it up. It's no masterpiece, but I can think literally of thousands less imaginative. (That goes for Hulk and John Carter, as well) And the performances aren't bad. But let's not kid ourselves - it's a mess. And as an adaptation of the book, it's not very successful.
The book is a deeply personal work with some wonderful language, wild twists and turns, and a lot of heart. The adventures of Duddits and the gang as kids are both heartbreaking and inspiring. And they ring true even when you might not want them to. Good stuff. I referred to Stand by Me, above, but the parallel here would definitely be It. (Right down to the setting in Derry as well as references to "all those kids who keep disappearing" and some graffiti: Pennywise Lives.)
It will likely be one of the last blogs of this series, so we won't get to it for awhile. (The world gasps and with trembling hands updates its calendars...)
It may lose a little steam in the last 200 pages. Which may have been why Goldman decided to condense the interstate chase into a mano-y-mano helicopter showdown between Morgan Freeman and Damian Lewis... for the record, this is a condensation that doesn't work for me. (Though it fits the lunacy of the film enough where I laughed and went along with it.) And the very end of the film is a bit like a door slammed in your face; the book has an epilogue and some actual denouement.
One last thing - the book deals with the wider implications of an alien invasion. (A Presidential address, the reality of citizens with lawyers and families getting corralled and "disappeared," the decades-long UFO phenomenon, and some quarantine-and-recovery for Henry and Jonesy after the whole experience) The movie does not. A huge wasted opportunity, if you ask me.
P.s. Very disappointed with internet-land for not picking up more on the Red Weed allusions. It's only War of the Worlds, people! Google searches for "red weed War of the Worlds" do not inspire confidence that enough people made the connection.
I'm a sucker for a good time travel story. The novella "The Langoliers" from Four Past Midnight is a good time travel story.
The made-for-TV movie is not.
Actually, there's plenty to recommend it, and it's not the time travel that sinks this one. Wha There are few more faithful adaptations of an original King story than this, so you'd figure I'd love it since I love the novella, but the movie is a textbook example of what happens when you translate a story to screen and do not condense or compartmentalize the material. (An essential act of story-to-screen transcription, if you ask me)
The movie has been referred to it as a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to 4 hours. While it's actually only 3, it's a reasonable description.
The other story it reminded me of was "A Matter of Minutes" from the 80s Twilight Zone. (The one with the Grateful Dead doing the theme song)
Adapted by Harlan Ellison from a story by Theodore Sturgeon, who, it must be mentioned, wrote this:
God bless him, and thank you Jeff for the image.
I do not suggest it's derivative, only that these other stories came to mind.
Anytime I read a work of King's during this period (this came out in 1990, which means it was likely written in '88 or '89), I imagine the day-to-day reality of those Ace Frehley years: Tony-Soprano-esque yet not Tony-Soprano-esque, laying golden eggs by the dozen at great cost to his peace/stability of mind and family. Considering Four Past Midnight came out right after this period, it's hard not to cross-reference to his commentary from On Writing. "I was not in shouting distance of my right mind."
If I was King, I'd perhaps get tired of people projecting "Oh he must have been addressing his addiction/ recovery" on every-and-anything from this period, but there are times when he introduces a character or situation that seems to be commenting so explicitly on his own journey through addiction that you can't help but notice. So, I do here but don't want to make too much of it: the black-bearded character - passed out during most of the events of the novella (not in the movie) - seems to me to be a recovery talisman of a kind.
(If you're interested, see ch 9.4 for more on this, and the 2nd or 3rd last paragraph from the very end. Then, if you like, consider how this character provides an interesting side-narrative for a story on the idea of time-eating-itself.)
King's substance-abuse years (and his recovery from them) are an ongoing subtext during this period of his writing from 1980 to 1990-ish, the same way the traffic accident in 1999 and his recovery from that inform his work from 2000 on. How could they not?
Along these lines, one of the things I like about King's work is that there will always be a writer around somewhere. It's a fun thing to look forward to; at some point after I start something new by him, a character will turn around and say Oh, who, me? I'm the writer of mystery novels....
Dean Stockwell of God-so-many-damn-shows-but-Brother-freaking-Cavill-from-Battlestar-most-particularly, plays that part here:
How do you know that God is on your side, Doctor?
Speaking of casting, here's Maximum Overdrive's Frankie Faison as Don Gaffney:
This guy is going for the King-adaptation record. Though he appears to have slowed down considerably in recent years. (JULY 2013 EDIT: They should've cast him in "Under the Dome.")
The story itself is about a "tear" in time-space, and a plane that goes through it. Hijinks ensue. The Langoliers, so named after one character's sublimation of parental abuse and expectation, arrive to eat time, and here is the most interesting part of the novella, but not the movie.
Maybe because the Langoliers look like this in the movie.
As the characters arrive at the conclusion that they have moved through time and that the past is a sterile world, as "dead as a used paint can," the Langoliers finally arrive on the scene. They are time-space termites that decimate lingering elements of The Past so The Presentcan roll on and on. Further hijinks ensue. As mentioned earlier, the novella does a better job of wrapping it up; the movie ends with a Breakfast Club moment where Alfred (who seemed a lot younger in the novella; actually, all of the characters seem sanitized/ compromised in their movie incarnations vis-a-vis the novella) leaps into the air, fist-raised.
The f/x switch from the bad-computer-graphics of DOS to stock footage of planes; very sloppy.
A few mentions are made of the Mary Celeste. Interesting reading, if you're so inclined.
I wasn't very invested in the Nick/ Laurel relationship. Nor the little-girl-with-psychic-talents aspect. Not that they came across badly (though it's weird - some of Nick's dialogue comes across way better in the movie than the book, whereas the Nick/Laurel romance does not come believably at all. That "Daisies! Daisies!" bit at the end especially. I know this won't make sense to a lot of people, that' ok)
King cameo:
Stapler.
Mainly, the movie just doesn't pull it off. The f/x are bad and inconsistent. Bronson Pinchot gives an eccentric but not quite convincing performance. It's easy enough to put some things to the side in the novella (one example - when they discover the left-behind accoutrements of all those not present after The Event, from dental fillings to surgical pins to dentures to wigs, no one asks But why are there no clothes?) but the movie sits a little too long in some of its mistakes, if that makes any sense.
