Weirdhouse Cinema: Sleepwalkers

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss 1992’s Sleepwalkers, directed by Mick Garris and scripted by Stephen King. It’s a bonkers romp through the American Heartland and the secret world of secret soul-sucking werecats, starring Brian Krause, Alice Krige and Mädchen Amick.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
For today's movie selection, we are returning to the early
nineteen nineties with what I think is one of the
weirder Stephen King films you could possibly ask for, and
that is Sleepwalkers, directed by Mick Garris.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Folks, you've heard of the ancient Greek play Oedipus Rex.
I think we could call this movie Oedipus Garfield.

Speaker 4 (00:35):
What do you think?

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Maybe? Maybe? Yeah. This is a film that is notable
for its incestuous cat people, but there's a lot more
going on there. It's a lot weirder than just that,
as we'll get into. This is one I definitely remember
the trailers for because I was already a pretty dedicated

(00:58):
Stephen King reader at this point and pretty much believed
he could do no wrong. I was just reading like
nothing but Stephen King books, and I considered the checklist
of his books in the back of the paperbacks, where
you could like send away for them. I considered this
be something of a syllabus for life. Oh and I
would do things like and this is this is horrible,

(01:18):
but I would have my lunch money for the week,
and instead of spending it on lunch at school, I
would pocket it all because at the end of a
week of not eating lunch, I would have enough money
to blow on a Stephen King paperback.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Well, now that I am a parent, I can't quite
encourage that sort of deceptive behavior. But on the other hand,
that's beautiful. I mean I love that.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
This is why I never read Cycle of the Werewolf,
because it was illustrated and therefore cost a little bit more,
and I was like, I can't that's too rich for
my blood.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Oh man, Yeah, I never got to that one either. God,
I remember that same thing that the old like order
form pages you would get in the end of a paperback.
That was whoever came out up with that idea first
is brilliant marketing.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
I kind of I encounter one every now and again
in an old paperback and I'm like, I want to
send off. I want to see what happens. It's like
writing into the Mystery Science Theater three thousand fan club.
It's like, I want to do it. You've got that address.
It's got to go somewhere.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Maybe it's still active. You ever read about those things
that are like they used to have those telephone tip
lines for like old computer games in the like late
eighties and early nineties.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
At least like nine hundred numbers.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Yeah, you could pay money to call in for like
tips on how to beat a computer game. And some
of these lines stayed active for a long time.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
Oh wow, Yeah, because it's just automated pre recorded messages, right,
I guess so. Yeah, huh.

Speaker 3 (02:40):
Sorry that took us a feeling. Yes, Sleepwalkers, I agree
with you, Rob. This is a movie I saw when
I was younger, I think, on on cable and revisiting
it this week, it was so much weirder than I remembered,
and I remembered it being pretty darn weird.

Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah. Same. I must have seen it on cable back
in the day. I think I rented it on DVD
at some point, you know, in the past twenty years,
but I probably didn't give it a dedicated viewing and
you know, enough to really appreciate how deeply bonkers it is.
It's full of tonal whiplash, monster madness. Stephen King late

(03:18):
twentieth century Americana and also a good half dozen cameos.

Speaker 4 (03:22):
Yeah, you can.

Speaker 3 (03:23):
Tell this movie has the feeling of like of a
party for horror nerds. Yeah, Like it feels like one
of those movies that was for the people making it
more than it was for the audience. And I'm not
complaining now being part of the audience, but you can
tell it was just kind of you know, throwing weird
cameos in for really no reason at all, except I

(03:45):
think just for you know, different horror authors and people
involved in in the you know, Stephen King's social circle
to have fun, you know, just oh, I.

Speaker 4 (03:54):
Want to show up. I want to be in this movie.

Speaker 3 (03:56):
Stephen King himself shows up of course. And also I
think what you're talking about with the tonal whiplash, where
it just cuts from like a very serious, somber moment
to the weirdest goofiest one liners you've ever seen, like
right back to back. It feels just like people playing around.

Speaker 2 (04:15):
Yeah. Yeah, and then at the same time there are
stretches where it's like it's really serious. And we mentioned
the Incestuous Cat People. I will say that the Incestuous
Cat People is played pretty much straightforward. It's not played
for laughs. I think if it had been played for laughs,
the project would have been ruined. I don't think it
would be watchable. I think it would just be super

(04:36):
hammy and not in a pleasant way. But it's played straight.
The goofiness kind of arises from other aspects of the film,
and it's a large part of why it still mostly works.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
It's played very serious in every scene that takes place
within the cat people's house. Yeah, but every scene that
takes place outside of their house has the chance to
go off the rails into zany town.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
That's good. That's a good observation. Now, folks upfront, I
want to advise everyone that this this is a cat movie.
This is a movie that has a lot of love
for cats. But I need to warn you that there
is a fair amount of simulated violence against cats in
the picture. It was. It's all very much above board
as far as I understand. You can read about it
at Humanehollywood dot org. But you know, cats are the

(05:22):
good guys in this movie, but they got to take
a beating in order to have that big victory moment
laid in the picture.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Yeah, it might be under selling it a little bit
just to say some simulated violence. I mean you are
going to see like fake cats ripped in half hanging
from ropes and stuff.

Speaker 4 (05:37):
Yeah, but they're fake. They're fake, they're fake.

Speaker 2 (05:39):
The cats are all okay, I mean they're all dead
now because the cats don't live that long. But yeah,
but all the cat None of the cats were harmed
in the making of this picture. But if you're sensitive
to that sort of thing, you might want to skip it.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
But also, as you say, ultimately a cat really is
the hero of the film.

Speaker 2 (05:57):
Absolutely, yes, Clovis who will get to in at Clovis
and his fellow cats are the ones that are gonna
ultimately save the day. So you know, you could probably
put together an elevator pitch that really stresses this. But
another way to think about this, this is a film
that is deeply about this strange relationship and this strange

(06:21):
bond between a monster and the monster's mother. So in
a sense, this is Stephen King's Beowolf, except there's no
Beowolf to play opposite Grendall and Grendall's mother. In this case,
we have Clovis the cat.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
Yeah, Clovis is the Beowolf. Clovis is Beowulf. You could
say that, how does the rest work it. The rest
doesn't work so well. I guess you could sort of
say that Tanya and her family are like Brothgar's mead
Hall and the monster attacks it, and then of course
they have to hire Clovis, the outside defender, to come
and kill the monster.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
Yeah, and Clovis has other motivations as well, as we'll
get into. Clovis really one of the deeper characters in
this picture. This fits a film mostly about monsters and Clovis.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
Do you remember the scenes where so Clovis is a
cat who we first meet as the pet of a
police officer, and he's riding around in the.

Speaker 4 (07:13):
Police car, which he does ride along.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Hilarious idea to begin with, but also in every scene
where they wanted to have the police police officer character
like get out of the car and walk around while
Clovis is still supposed to be in the car, it's
obviously like a stuffed animal in there because it's holding still.

Speaker 2 (07:31):
Well, you know, cats are famously difficult to direct. You know,
you can hear this from everyone. The Coen Brothers were
very very adamant about this. For example, you know, they're
very difficult. It's very difficult to get a cat to
do what you want or anything close to what you
want in a picture, and this is a picture that
has scenes with hundreds of cats. I have no idea

(07:52):
how they ultimately pull these shots off. Clovis hits his marks.
He's a good boy. Absolutely. We'll get into the feline
actor behind the performance here in a bit.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
But oh, folks, you might be confused because we've been
talking about the monsters in the movie as cats and
then also about cats. So this is a movie, to clarify,
that has a lot of straightforward animal cats in it,
just like the cats you're familiar with. But then also
the monsters are where cat vampires. They're half human half

(08:23):
cat magical beings.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah, kind of like hairless cat human hybrids that are
also energy vampires and shape shifters and wizards in their
own right. Yes, we'll learn in the second half of
the picture.

Speaker 3 (08:40):
Yeah, the movie keeps introducing new powers for them, even
in like the last five minutes of the film. I
think it's literally five minutes from the end credits that
we learned they can they have telekinesis we have not
seen up until this point.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
I mean, it makes a lot of sense because we
learn that they are old, they are ancient, they're long lived.
I mean, they're essentially demigods, like the children of bast
and so forth.

Speaker 4 (09:04):
All right, should we do some trailer audio?

Speaker 2 (09:06):
Yeah, let's listen to the trailer for this one. Just
a bit of it. We'll get some of that great
early nineties narration. You cannot be in love with this girl.

Speaker 4 (09:20):
I don't know me, Tanya.

Speaker 5 (09:23):
Behind their smile is a secret. Come in, don I
have something for you. I don't know who you are,
but I know you're not who you say you are.
Behind the secret is a hunger.

Speaker 4 (09:37):
Does it have to be her?

Speaker 5 (09:39):
And behind it all is the imagination of Stephen King.

Speaker 4 (09:51):
He killed one of my men. He was scared of a.

Speaker 5 (09:55):
Cat, Stephen King's Sleepwalkers.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
All right, So if you're wondering, well, hey, where can
I watch Sleepwalkers before proceeding with the rest of the episode,
or maybe you want to, you know, get a copy
of it for later. Well, this was a major release,
and a successful release of that, I should pinpoint this
movie made money. You can easily get your hands on
a digital or physical version. I rented the standard no

(10:41):
frills Blu ray from Atlanta's own videodrome and picture looks great.
That's a great way to go about it. But Shout
Factory put out a special edition in several years back,
and I think this one's absolutely the way to go
if you can get your hands on it. I couldn't
get it shipped to me in time for this episode,
but it features new poster art by Devin Whitehead that

(11:02):
is absolutely amazing. It has Clovis the cat front and
center leaping out at you. I love this.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yes, Clovis is leaping out of a big wad of
pink magic energy. Also, the two main monsters in the
film are the Sun Monster, are Grendall, Charles Brady and
Grendall's mother Mary Brady. They're leaping out of the magic energy.
And then also a car, yeah Transam, right, the Blue
trans The Blue trans Am is the central cool car

(11:32):
in the movie, and of course that has to go
on the poster. The car is a major character in
the film, Yes it is.

Speaker 2 (11:40):
And oh man, some of you might be wondering what
kind of sucker pays extra to get like a cool
cover on a Blu Ray re release. Well I am
that sucker. I am the kind of person who does that,
And I'm very tempted to find a copy of this
and get it shipped to me. But also yet, Devin Whitehead,
you can look him up on Instagram, Devin draws. He
does a lot of these postss for re releases of

(12:02):
films and it's all amazing for it. Oh. I should
also add the Blu Ray also has a ton of
extras that look really cool that I am also jealous
that I wasn't able to get my hands on before
we recorded here.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
I would like to learn more about this production, especially
given the cameo party elements we've already talked about.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Yeah, yeah, I do have a couple of details about
that as we go on. But yeah, I don't know
exactly how all of it came together other than Stephen
Kingscott buddies and you know, he calls him in. You know,
you might have a cameo in a picture. You might
get to jam with him in a rock and roll band.
It just varies, all right. Let's talk about the people
behind this movie, starting at the top with the director.

(12:41):
It's Mick Garris born nineteen fifty one, American horror filmmaker
and general horror officionado during the late seventies. He worked
his way up through various forms of sort of cinema
adjacent media, including a local LA cable access interview show
called Fantasy Film Festival, in which he interviewed such filmmaking
or as John Carpenter and Steven Spielberg. You can actually

(13:03):
find uploads of this on YouTube.

Speaker 4 (13:05):
Is he a good interviewer?

Speaker 2 (13:07):
Ah, you know, I didn't. It seemed like he was.
I didn't watch enough to really get a sense of it.
But he seemed to have a good rapport with these
various directors. Like a lot of his peers, mc gerris
grew up making like eight millimeter films, but his first
credited industry directorial work came in the form of making

(13:28):
of documentaries for such films as nineteen eighty ones The Howling,
eighty two's The Thing, and nineteen eighty five's The Goonies.

Speaker 3 (13:35):
Huh, this is sort of making sense. Okay, So he's
interviewing horror filmmakers, he's doing making of documentaries about their films.
It almost seems like one of those fan turned creator arcs.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah. Yeah, I mean all creators were fans at one point?
Are they better have been? So from there he goes
on to direct a pair of TV show at the
Duds Anthology episodes in nineteen eighty six. One airs on
the Magical World of Disney. It is titled Fuzzbucket and
it's an imaginary friends story, you know, for kids. And

(14:09):
then he also did an episode of Amazing Stories titled
Life on Death Row starring Patrick Swayzee. He followed this
up with nineteen eighty eight Critters Too The Main Course,
followed by some more TV work, including Psycho four, and
then this film, the first Stephen King film based entirely
on an original screenplay by Stephen King.

Speaker 3 (14:31):
That is interesting. So this is the first one not
adapted from a novel or from some other media, And
I wonder if that difference contributes to the kind of loose, exploratory,
playful feel of this movie.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
Yeah maybe so, Like it's I don't know that a
lot of information is really out there about how the
story came together. I think there's I've read some stuff
that seemed to indicate it might have been an old
story idea that King either or didn't get published or
didn't finish or you know, rework for some reason or another.
But you know, you can't help but watch it and
wonder what form it would have taken had he actually

(15:11):
written it as a novel. You know, what point of
views would we have. How much Clovis pov would we get.
I bet we would have had some nest King definitely
would do animal povs in some of his books.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
I kind of wonder if it would have less of
the free wheeling zaniness if it were an adaptation of
a novel, because when you're adapting a novel, there's kind
of this feeling of responsibility, you know, taken to varying
levels of seriousness by different directors, but some feeling of
responsibility to the source material, whereas this being its own

(15:41):
original thing, you could just kind of let it all
hang out.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
I do. I have a strong suspicion that if we
had seen Sleepwalkers as a novel, we would have had
a lot more insight into the mindset of the character
Charles Brady, the grindele monster of the pair, and sort
of his place as a character kind of caught between
two worlds, between the world of predatory monsters in the

(16:06):
world of living humans that are their prey.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
That is hinted at in the movie, though it doesn't
feel like it really, it doesn't feel like the movie
really takes that theme seriously, if you know what I mean,
Because you know, he has a few lines about like, oh,
you know, am I actually falling in love with this
girl who's soul I'm trying to steal by sucking pink
magic out of her mouth? You know, it suggests that

(16:31):
in the dialogue. But then also he has shown to
be essentially a totally heartless, soulless character who just like
wants to like run down children with his car for fun.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Yeah, and I think that's that's that's kind of a
big missed opportunity with this film, And that's where the
film really breaks down, is that is that we don't
we don't really explore his character all that much, and
he just we tease the possibility that there's more there,
but then he does just become a mini called Madman Killer.

Speaker 3 (17:01):
So the Madman stuff in the movie or mad Monster,
especially when you get to the Mary stuff later on,
is some of the most memorable stuff in the film.
Like it gets so wild.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
Now. From what I've read, Garris was King's pick to
direct this picture. There was somebody else that they were
talking to about it, but they were pushing for major
changes the King didn't want, and so Garrison Kings seem
to have a good remote creative process going on. I've
seen some interviews where Mike Garris talks about this, and

(17:31):
they would like it was facts based. They were like
faxing the script back and forth and making some changes
here and there, and then they didn't actually meet in
person until they filmed the cameo later on in the picture,
and the.

Speaker 3 (17:44):
First thing Stephen King said to him was.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
Piano fax machine joke. The partnership here would continue with
Garris directing the nineteen ninety four TV mini series The Stand,
the nineteen ninety seven adaptation of The Shining, two thousand
and four's Riding the Bullet, two thousand and six is Desperation,

(18:07):
and twenty eleven's Bag of Bones. Now I have to
admit I don't think I've seen most of these. I've
seen parts of the Stand, and I know that that
TV mini series version of The Stand has its followers.
And of course I loved the book that was a
core King text back in the day.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
I remember, I don't know if I ever watched the
whole thing of that adaptation of the Stand, but I've
seen parts of it. It has the very famous opening
where you're at the government lab and it's playing Don't
Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cold.

Speaker 2 (18:40):
Oh yeah. But anyway, I believe that Mick Garris has
the record so far for feature film adaptations of Stephen King.
On top of this, he's also directed episodes of Tales
from the Crypt and Masters of Horror, which he also created.
His screenplays and story credits also include nineteen eighty seven's
Batteries Not included, nineteen eighty nine is the Fly Too,

(19:02):
in nineteen ninety three's hocus Pocus. Garris has also written
some novels, but not nearly as many as the gentleman
behind the screenplay here, and that of course is Stephen
King born nineteen forty seven, the King of Horror himself,
the most successful horror novelist of all time and one
of the most successful novelist period, still writing, still publishing.

(19:24):
And you know, we can't hope to cover everything that
Stephen King has done here in this episode. So let's
sort of place ourselves around the year nineteen ninety two.
So at this point he'd already published something like twenty
five books under his own name and that of Richard Bachman,
as well as something like forty four short stories and
this and this all included some of his best known

(19:46):
work and some of his best work. And on the
film front, there were already multiple adaptations, including Stanley Kubrick's
The Shining from nineteen eighty. Other adaptations that he'd been
more involved in personally, generally on the writing side, but
sometimes acting as well include eighty two's Creep Show, eighty
five's Cats Eye and Silver Bullet, nineteen eighty six is

(20:09):
Maximum Overdrive, which is also his sole directorial credit, eighty
seven's creep Show two, and nineteen eighty nine's Pet Cemetery.

Speaker 3 (20:17):
Acting in Creep Show being the central character in one
of the vignettes there.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
That's right. His Oscar snowed performance is Jeordie Verel in
Creep Showyeah, not a cameo, but the title character in
that segment. A wild a wild performance for sure, But
generally when he appears in something, it is a little
cameo and it actually his His screen credits go back

(20:44):
to nineteen eighty one's Night Writers, directed by George Romero,
in which he played the HOGI man.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
I would say legitimately in Sleepwalkers. His cameo is one
of the funniest parts of the movie.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
It's quite good. Yeah, King King cameos. They vary in
length and intensity, but the King can be a lot
of fun. He shows up in Sons of Anarchy at
one point. Oh yeah, remember that he's what a he's
like a cleaner or a fixer.

Speaker 3 (21:14):
Yeah, he's like a weird guy who tries to cover
up crime scenes, I think, But yeah, in this movie
he plays a weirdo.

Speaker 2 (21:22):
Of course.

Speaker 3 (21:22):
He plays like this strange, creepy owner of a cemetery
where the monster attacks the main girl in the movie,
and after the attack is over, he's walking around talking
to various police officers and just anybody who will listen.
He's like, look, I've got enough trouble. I don't need
this action.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah, it's a fun cameo. So if you're a King fan,
this film's worth watching for a number of reasons, including that. Sleepwalkers,
of Course, as we mentioned, was his first produced original screenplay,
again possibly stemming from an unpublished story idea. But again,
I don't he's ever said much about it. I was
looking around to find any interview segments where he really

(22:04):
gets into Sleepwalkers and the genesis of the idea, and
I'm not sure it's really out there. I did run
across an interview where Garis pointed out that King's wife
Tabitha apparently put together a concept for a sequel to
Sleepwalkers that somehow are revolved around a women's basketball team,
But sadly, you know that did not come to fruition either.

Speaker 4 (22:26):
I would love to see that catsketball.

Speaker 2 (22:30):
Now. I do want to note that this film, Sleepwalkers,
this is an example of dead sober Stephen King. Stephen
King got sober in nineteen eighty seven after struggling with
some substance abuse in the years prior.

Speaker 3 (22:44):
Which is funny because a lot of reviewers online, who
I guess are unaware of this timeline, pegs Sleepwalkers as
like peak cocaine madness Stephen King. And it is easy
to see how people could make this assumption because the
movie is so wild, and especially I think because of
the tonal whiplash that you already mentioned. But in reality,

(23:06):
I believe Stephen King has has sort of identified the
novel The Tommy Knockers as his peak of struggles with
drugs and alcohol. That was one of the last things
before he got sober, and he is. He has since
quite like tried to disown the Tommy Knockers, saying like, yeah,
I wrote it, but it's terrible. I don't know if
he's ever disowned Sleepwalkers. And maybe this, despite whatever whatever

(23:31):
is kind of working at weird frequencies within it, it
does seem to be an authentic product of the mind
of Stephen King.

Speaker 2 (23:40):
Yeah. I don't think reviewers were necessarily kind to it,
but it at the time, but it, you know, it
was a success, and I think a lot of people
have come back to it and appreciate it, and you know,
in some ways it is an outlier, but there are
a lot of familiar King themes present in this. You know,
of course, we have the familiar theme small town America

(24:02):
getting invaded by some sort of ancient evil, and then
more specifically we're dealing with energy vampires, which you see
arguably and it you certainly see in the Dark Tower
series and also in Doctor Sleep, which features nomadic energy
vampires led by an enigmatic female leader. So you could
almost think about Doctor Sleep as being a return to

(24:23):
some of the themes from Sleepwalker.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
I guess taking it a lot more seriously and basing
it more on serious characters that he had already created
and wanted to come back to, like Danny Torrens.

Speaker 4 (24:34):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Yeah, you could sort of look at Sleepwalkers as a
gonzo reinterpretation of Salem's Lot, but with monsters more less
like traditional vampires and more like the monsters in Doctor Sleep.

Speaker 4 (24:50):
Yeah, but also cats.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
And I should point out that cats do feature into
a number of Stephen king works pet Cemetery, of course,
the cat from well obviously Cat's Eye, LT's theory of pets,
and we you know, we do occasionally get animal povs
in his writing. And again I can only assume Clovis
would have been given this treatment if Sleepwalkers had come

(25:13):
together as a novel instead of a film.

Speaker 3 (25:16):
I like how in the outline you've included multiple pictures
of Stephen King holding a cat.

Speaker 2 (25:20):
Yes, yes, one of them. He's like crawling with cats.
I think he has a big cat in his lap
and then a kitten on his head and on his shoulder.
All right, let's get into the cast here. We're going
to start with We're going to take it in chunk,

(25:41):
So we're going to start with our monster family with
the Brady family. Our Grendel character, Charles Brady, is played
by Brian Krause born nineteen sixty nine, American actor who
kicked things off playing teens on TV and I believe
nineteen eighty nine at the age of nineteen or twenty,
and by Night ninety one he'd appeared in the sequel

(26:02):
Return to the Blue Lagoon alongside Mila Djoviovic, and by
the time of Sleepwalkers, I believe he was twenty two
or twenty three, which I think is perfect because he
feels slightly too mature to be a teenager in this
which is perfectly in keeping with so many teen heartthrob
films and also horror films of the classic period, the

(26:24):
sort of films that this movie plays off off to
some degree, and since his character is actually some kind
of kind of immortal, supernatural predator, it also feels right
that he doesn't quite fit in.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Yes, but he also brings a thing that's come into
a lot of vampire type stories, which is incredible handsomeness
and charisma. Brian Kraus is a hunk, and the hunkiness
is just like blasting out of the TV screen when
he's in frame.

Speaker 2 (26:52):
Yeah, yeah, first scene he's shirtless and then carve something
into his arm. We'll get to that now. Kraus would
go on to appear on TV's Tales from the Crypt,
He did thirty three episodes of Another World, and just
lots of TV appearances. Even pops up on Mad Men
in two thousand and eight, and he did voice acting
for the video game Fallout seventy six. In general, it

(27:13):
seems like he stayed very busy in a range of
acting gigs. Seems to play a lot of police officers
these days, in addition to his hunkiness. I generally think
he's quite good in this, even when his character's riding
veers off in different directions. You know, obviously he didn't
write the thing, but you know, he rides it out
as best he can here.

Speaker 3 (27:34):
And sometimes he has to act with cat face makeup
on so yes, that's another thing too.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
Yes, I do love how there's like different variations of
how cat like they are. There's like their true monstrous
cat form that we get glimpses of and then get
to see more in the finale, and they're just like
pure you know, full blown monsters, a full bodysuit effect.
But then there are times when they're in a fully
human in disguise and then other times it's like catface makeup,

(28:04):
and the makeup is quite good. Well, we'll get back
to the who's responsible for that? But in general I
loved all the practical effects here.

Speaker 3 (28:11):
Yeah, they've got like nine different kinds of heads and faces,
and there's one scene where we get to see Charles
more through all of them when he is surprised by
a cat.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
Oh yeah, at nine lives, why not? All right? Playing
Mary Brady, the Grindall's mother of the two is Alice
Kriega born nineteen fifty four South African born actress who
went on to find success first on the stage with
the Royal Shakespeare Company, I Believe and the small screen
for BBC Productions in the UK, before making the transition

(28:44):
into an eclectic mix of films and finally achieving greater
fame for a number of delightful villain roles in genre pictures.
In nineteen eighty one, she appeared in Chariots of Fire
as well as John Irvin's Ghost Story, based on a
novel by King Buddy and Talisman co author Peter Strab.

(29:04):
She followed this up with nineteen eighty five's King David.
That's the one that has George Eastman in it.

Speaker 4 (29:09):
Oh, does he play Goliath?

Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah? Yeah, George Eastman's Galaka. Yeah. Who else would he play?

Speaker 4 (29:15):
I don't know, it seemed logical.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
She was in nineteen eighty seventh Sheba, she was in
nineteen eighty seven's Barfly. But one of her most iconic
genre roles came later on in nineteen ninety six in
Star Trek First Contact, in which she of course plays
the Borg Queen, a delicious main antagonist. And this is
a character that she would later reprise on TV's Voyager,

(29:41):
as well as various voice acting gigs for Star Trek
shows and Star Trek video games.

Speaker 4 (29:48):
Now am I remembering this? Right?

Speaker 3 (29:49):
Of course, this would not be a reflection at all
on alis Kriega for playing the role.

Speaker 4 (29:54):
But do I recall that.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
The Borg Queen is a somewhat controversial character among Star
Trek fans because it's sort of a violation of the
principle of the Borg that they don't they don't have
a top down control or a leader or anything.

Speaker 2 (30:08):
Yeah, that's my understanding, And I you know, I'm not
I'm not the biggest trekky out there, but I was
a regular viewer of Star Trek the Next Generation and
looking back, like, that's one of the things about the
Borg is that they're decentralized there, you know, they're they're
use social in their format, and therefore that's why they're
inhuman and such a threat to our individuality.

Speaker 4 (30:29):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
At some point, Data's evil twin brother Lore like takes
over the Borg, and maybe for a while I thought, well,
that's why we end up with a board queen, because
Lore messed everything up. But then I was looking at
Memory Alpha and there's something about how the board Queen's
supposed to have been around for ages. So I don't
know where what where the lowercase Lore ends up deciding

(30:52):
all of this. But I will say I remember when
Star Trek First Contact came out. Part of me was
like the Boorg can't have a coin, that's wrong. But
then her performance is so wonderful that like you're just
one over. You're like, okay, you can have it. You're
the Queen. Yes, I put up no resistance. Resistance is futile.

(31:13):
Krika's other genre credits include two thousand and two's Reign
of Fire. Two thousand and six is Silent Hill, two
thousand and nine Solomon Kane, and twenty thirteen's Through the
Dark World.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Now, this is the kind of role that you could
imagine an actor having very different thoughts about. Either it
could be like, this is the weirdest thing I've ever
done and it's great, I'm gonna have fun, or like,
what have I gotten myself into? Am I destroying my
career by participating in this?

Speaker 4 (31:43):
And it is?

Speaker 3 (31:45):
She seems to embrace it, at least as far as
I can tell, Like she does she does the weird,
sensitive edible cat stuff, and then she also just like
goes full like terminator mode, Like she turns into Arnold
Schwartzenegger in the last third the movie, doing one liners
and doing them with evident relish. And Yeah, so I

(32:06):
thumbs up d Alis Kriega in Sleepwalkers.

Speaker 2 (32:09):
Yeah I love her in this just she's just absolutely
committed to this role, no matter how weird it is,
imbuing it with really like shakespeare In intensity at times.
I think her performance absolutely elevates the film, and it
helps that her character is also a good bit more
consistent compared to Charles, though again she does go into
full blown terminator mode, But so does Grindall's mom, Like,

(32:31):
that's it's fitting. You know.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Does anybody get murdered with a corn cob in BeO Wolf?

Speaker 4 (32:36):
I don't remember.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
Well, you know that might have been lost in some
of the translations. Well, no, obviously they wouldn't have had corn.
They would you'd have to stab them with some other
kind of vegetable.

Speaker 3 (32:46):
Yeah, Is there like a solid sheaf of wheat of
some kind?

Speaker 2 (32:51):
There's probably you could be there's some sort of read
on this where like the Sleepwalkers as ancient fertility goddesses
or something.

Speaker 4 (32:58):
Oh yeah, the Cult of series.

Speaker 2 (33:00):
Sure, all right, now it's time to meet the Robertsons.
The Robertsons are our you know, good old fashioned American
family that's threatened by supernatural evil, beginning with the teen
daughter Tanya Robertson played by mitchin Amik born nineteen seventy.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
This is basically our human protagonist. This is the main
good character who is threatened by the cat, the cat
energy vampires.

Speaker 2 (33:24):
Yeah. Yeah, she's a good girl, you know, good American
teenager working at the movie theater and you know, has
a certain weakness for really hunky students at are high school.
Which is where our energy vampire happens to be hanging
out and is currently enrolled in her creative writing class.

(33:46):
As we'll discuss.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
You know, one big media overlap I never noticed until
revisiting the movie this time is that Amic plays the
role of Shelley at the Diner in Twin Peaks.

Speaker 2 (33:57):
That's right. Yeah, she's Shelley Johnson from both runs of
Twin Peaks as well as Twin Peaks fire Walk with
Me from nineteen ninety two. She was also in the
nineteen ninety three film Dream Lover, and early on in
her career she also popped up on an episode of
Star Trek The Next Generation. I think, just playing like
a random team you know of probably one of Wesley
Crusher's fellow students. But she's gone on to appear on

(34:20):
everything from like mad Men to American Horror Story. And
I'd say, you know, solid lead performance. Here saw pretty
standard horror movie stuff, but she saw agree.

Speaker 3 (34:31):
She is a wholesome, well meaning character who is hard
not to love, and thus, even when the movie becomes
increasingly ludicrous, she does kind of ground it because you
are with her.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Yeah, all right, now let's meet her parents. First off,
we have mister Robertson played by an actor we've discussed
on Weird House before, Lyman Ward born nineteen forty one. Yes,
he was in nineteen eighty five's Creature that we discussed
on the show. But pretty much all of you are
going to know him or at least recognize him, perhaps
even without realizing it. From nineteen eighty six is Ferris

(35:03):
Bueller's Day Off, in which he plays the dad, Tom Buehler.
Now Tanya's mother, Miss Robertson, is played by Cindy Pickett
born nineteen forty seven. You'll recognize her as well because
she plays Ferris Bueller's mom in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Oh Boy. She also appeared in nineteen eighty nine's Deep
Star six and nineteen ninety three Son in Law, as

(35:26):
well as a couple of titles I just have to
mention these. No shade here, someone has to star in
movies like this. But she's also in nineteen ninety six
is Kid Cop and nineteen ninety eight's Atomic Dog.

Speaker 3 (35:37):
Is Kid Cop a movie about a kid who is
a cop or a cop who enforces the law on children.

Speaker 2 (35:44):
The former. Now this all gets weirder. So, first of
all again. Tanya's parents and Sleepwalkers are played by the
same actors who played Ferris Buehler's parents, and these two
actors were married in real life. And then it gets
even weirder. They apparently met and fell in love during
the production of Ferris Buehler's Day Off and divorced the

(36:08):
same year Sleepwalkers came out.

Speaker 4 (36:11):
Could it be true? That doesn't that's so strange.

Speaker 2 (36:16):
I mean, I'm probably very wrong on this, and I
don't want to pry into anybody's personal life, but it
seems possible that Sleepwalkers finished a marriage that began with
Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I don't know. It's a possibility,
is all I'm saying.

Speaker 3 (36:30):
We have to assume it was unrelated to Sleepwalkers.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
All right. So that's the family. That's the good old
American family. Most of the other characters in this film
are cops, so uns.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
So many cops, cops walking in and out of frame.
And have we seen this cop before? I don't know,
I don't remember.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
Yeah, and then we get like different divisions of law enforcement.
The main cop that we encounter is Sheriff Iris Stevens,
played by Jim Haney, who lived nineteen forty through twenty
twenty one American actor who worked in a lot of
TV shows, but also had memorable roles in Staying Together
in nineteen eighty nine, Bridges of Madison County in ninety five,
and The Peacemaker in ninety seven. His other credits include

(37:10):
John Carpenter's The Fog from nineteen eighty, nineteen nineties, Dark Angel,
which we've covered on the show, and even a bit
part as a cop in nineteen seventy nine's Time After
Time that we also talked about.

Speaker 3 (37:21):
He is the only cop in the movie who is
not primarily a comedic character.

Speaker 2 (37:27):
Yeah, because the next cop character that we see quite
a bit of is Deputy Sheriff Andy Simpson, played by
Dan Martin born nineteen fifty one. Image Award winning actor
whose credits include ninety four Is the Stand, ninety five's Heat,
two thousand's leprechan five in the Hood, and TV's The
Bold and the Beautiful. This is where he earned the

(37:48):
Image Award.

Speaker 3 (37:49):
He is one of the most entertaining actors in the
movie the way he's so. This is the owner of Clovis.

Speaker 4 (37:54):
This is the.

Speaker 3 (37:55):
Cop who has the attack cat who rides along in
his squad car. And he's also the cop who first
encounters our monster characters and sort of forms a vendetta
mission against them. But he also is really funny because
they just have a lot of scenes of him muttering
to himself and making up songs to himself as as

(38:17):
he drives around in his car. I don't know what
these songs are. They're just like vulgar little ditties.

Speaker 2 (38:22):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, he's a likable character, but we also
have a really unlikable cop character though he State police,
and this is Captain Solmes played by Ron Pearlman movie Trivia.

Speaker 3 (38:35):
In Sleepwalkers, Ron Perlman achieved the world record for the
longest tooth to tooth jawstretch film history.

Speaker 2 (38:44):
Yeah just about yeah. Born nineteen fifty. This is somehow
our first Ron Pearlman movie. But I think everybody knows
Ron Perlman rugged American character actor with a very rugged look,
great face, gravelly voice, frequently cast as heavies and authority figures,
but with some key breakout roles, such as Amacor in

(39:06):
nineteen eighty One's Quest for Fire. Salvatore in nineteen eighty
six is the name of the Rose that's one of
my favorites. He's great in nineteen ninety five's The City
of Lost Children, and of course he's hell Boy in
Giamel del Toro's two hell Boy films. He also famously
played the Beast on TV's Beauty and the Beast from
eighty seven through nineteen ninety, and his voice work has

(39:29):
included such shows as Batman, the animated series and Adventure Time.
I have to say, though, this is one of your like,
this is a small role, and it's a pretty standard
Ron Pearlman role. There's not really nothing special here, nothing
to see here, folks. This is just your grumpy, antagonistic
Ron Pearlman character.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Yeah, just a nasty, malicious cop played for slapstick comedy,
especially when Alice Krieger gets to bite his fingers off.
That's right, but also strange choice that, Like, you get
Ron Pearlman to be in your movie about cat human
hybrids and he doesn't play one.

Speaker 2 (40:08):
I mean maybe he was he was done with that
at this point. Maybe that was it. They were like,
a who would he play? There's no Grendel's dad in this,
But maybe he was just like, no, I'm done, I'm
done with that. Cat makeup.

Speaker 3 (40:18):
He already did Beauty in the Beast because he's got
like cat makeup in that, doesn't he Yeah, basically looks
like a Sleepwalker.

Speaker 5 (40:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
That of course was a show that was George R. R. Martin. Yeah.
Line yeah. Oh. And then also we already mentioned Sons
of Anarchy. He of course was one of the stars
of Sons of Anarchy.

Speaker 3 (40:35):
Wait, I just looked him up in Beauty and the Beast. Yeah,
he looks exactly like some of the cat faces. I mean,
as I mentioned, they have like nine different kinds of faces,
but he looks like one of the main cat faces
of the Sleepwalkers. So that is a that is a
strange overlap. I wonder if there was any makeup artists
overlap here.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
It's possible. It's possible. We'll get to the makeup in
just a minute. But let's see, we need to round
out the cast and rounding out the law enforcement side
of things again. We have Officer Clovis, the cat played
by the feline actor Sparks. Dates are unknown. We don't
know when Sparks was born or when Sparks passed on

(41:12):
into the cat after life. This is this felion actor's
only film credit, but what a performance. I say, from
the bottom of my heart, thank you for your service, Sparks.

Speaker 3 (41:22):
Yes, I hope Sparks received so many tins of sardines
for taking part in this film.

Speaker 2 (41:29):
All right, let's see there is a there's a small
part in this by Glenn Shattocks. It plays mister Fallows.
Shattucks lived nineteen fifty two through twenty ten, American character actor,
best known for his work with Tim Burton, especially the
role of Atho in nineteen eighty eight's Beetlejuice, and he
voiced the mayor in nineteen ninety three's The Nightmare Before Christmas,

(41:50):
and also appears in two thousand and ones Planet of
the Apes. He plays a creep in this, a human creep.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
A creepy creative writing teacher. Now, are we gonna mention
all of the celebrity and author cameos here or are
we going to save those like as we go through
the plot.

Speaker 2 (42:07):
Yeah, We'll come back to these as we go through
the plot. I'm going to round out things here by
just mentioning in brief the project supervisor on the special
effects here was Tony Gardner, aligned with Altirian Studios, Gardner
has headed up Alter Studios for something like thirty years
and has worked special makeup effects and special effects on

(42:29):
such films as eighty seven's The Lost Boys, eighty eight's
The Blob, nineteen nineties Night Breed, and many others. He
was even on Stan Winston's Aliens Crew back in eighty six,
and he was also involved in the special effects for
nineteen eighty three's thriller the music video.

Speaker 3 (42:46):
Oh Wow, every movie you listed, I think has great
special effects.

Speaker 2 (42:49):
Yeah, and this film's got him too, Like I say,
I loved all the makeup effects in this Now, on
the music front, the composer here was Nicholas Pike born
nineteen fifty five, British composer whose scores include eighty six's
Graveyard Shift, Critters to eighty nine's Chud to Bud The Chud,
ninety seven's The Shining and five episodes of Masters of Horror.

Speaker 3 (43:11):
I don't have a lot of memories one way or
another about the original score for the film, because the
most memorable musical moments in the movie are the use
of pre existing tracks, notably the Santo and Johnny track
from nineteen fifty nine Sleepwalk, which even if you don't
know that song by name, everybody, you would recognize it
if you heard it. It's got a very very familiar

(43:33):
steel guitar melody. For some reason, I associate it with
scenes in a movie in which somebody is dreaming about
a Hawaiian vacation.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Yeah, it does. What is that slide guitar? Are we hearing?
Is that?

Speaker 4 (43:45):
I think it's steel guitar, steal guitar?

Speaker 2 (43:46):
Okay, Yeah, it's a famous It's one of those tracks
that you might not know it by name, but if
you hear the tune, yeah, you'll recognize it for sure.

Speaker 3 (43:56):
But also not just that needle drop. There's a moment
early on when we're when we were seeing the cops
walking around to scene sort of in the prologue, and
there's this very like sad, thoughtful, mournful music playing with
this voice just humming a tune without any words. I
was like, man, that voice that sounds so much like Enya?

Speaker 4 (44:15):
What is this? I looked it up.

Speaker 3 (44:16):
It is Enya. It's an India track.

Speaker 2 (44:19):
That's right. Yeah, it's the track Bodica off of. It
was on her self titled album, her debut album, but
then that album was later renamed the Celts to correspond
with the music's use on a BBC documentary of the
same name. I was a big fan of her work
back in the nineties, and I think this is a
great track. This is one of her best. Not all

(44:41):
of her tracks are the sort of thing I would
have listened to today, Like some of them feel a
little dated in their new agingus, But this one's really good.
Just her ethereal vocals, a lot of cool synth, so
I think it's a really solid one, well used here.
And I believe this is also the track of the
fujis sampled in one of their hits.

Speaker 3 (45:01):
I think this song was saying. I think I read
this song was sampled in a lot of other songs.
But yeah, it certainly it's very very moody track, big
dark mood that and you can see why it was
used at least at like four different points in the movie.
It's at the beginning, it's at a few different scenes,
and it's in the end credits.

Speaker 2 (45:22):
Yeah, it gives it that kind of timeless weight, ancient
weight to the origins of these monstrous creatures.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
Oh and then there's one more track like that. There's
a scene where they use Do You Love Me by
the Contours?

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Oh yeah, yeah, and that's a great track as well.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
Okay, you ready to talk about the plot, let's do it.
So we open in silence with some text on the screen.
It is an entry from a reference text called the
Chillicothe Encyclopedia of Arcane Knowledge, first edition, eighteen eighty four.
And I looked this up to see if this is
a real book.

Speaker 2 (46:02):
It is not, Oh really, because I mean, I have
a copyright here. I have it next to my Necronomicon,
my book of Forbidden Cults. No, but seriously, you're correct.
This is a one of the many fictional forbidden occult tomes.
I'm a sucker for any of these.

Speaker 3 (46:19):
When you own a copy of a book that doesn't exist,
that's always a cause for concern. But yeah, so it's
like an it's framed like an encyclopedia entry. It says sleepwalker. Sleepwalker.
That is the entry noun nomadic shape shifting creatures with
human and feline origins, Vulnerable to the deadly scratch of

(46:40):
a cat. The sleepwalker feeds upon the life force of
virginal human female's probable source of the vampire legend, and
then it's got the Chilicoat citation and several things about
this I love. First of all, this is one of
my favorite things to do when you like invent new
lore for your movie, is you suggest that the lore

(47:01):
element you just created was the inspiration for familiar lore.
So it's like, Oh, they got the idea for vampires
from the thing I just made up.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Yes, here is the true occurrences that inspired Mary Shelley
to write Frankenstein.

Speaker 4 (47:16):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (47:17):
I also love that they say sleepwalkers are of human
and feline origins, and that just confused me because the
movie makes it seem like sleepwalkers are supernatural in origin,
but human and feline.

Speaker 4 (47:32):
Does that mean that's like.

Speaker 3 (47:33):
The result of sexual reproduction between a human and a cat.

Speaker 4 (47:36):
What does that mean?

Speaker 2 (47:37):
Yeah, I don't think that. I don't think it works.
I'm casting doubt on this detail. We should also probably
acknowledge that these creatures are called sleepwalkers. There's nothing about
them that lines up with the human phenomena of sleepwalking
or any kind of parisomnia. In fact, sleep doesn't really
seem to factor into anything they do at all.

Speaker 3 (47:58):
Yeah, has nothing to do with sleep. I don't know this.
I'm just guessing, but I really strong guess. It's just
that Stephen King was like thinking of the song sleepwalk
and was like, Oh, that's a cool word for a monster, sleepwalkers,
and just sort of pegged that on to the cat
the wear cats he was already thinking about. And there's

(48:20):
no connection, really, it just sounded.

Speaker 2 (48:22):
Cool, fair enough, really cool.

Speaker 4 (48:24):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (48:24):
There's an eerie silence while you get to read this
encyclopedia entry, and I hope you don't read too slow,
because there's a boo scare on the encyclopedia. It's like
a sudden cat scratch. There's a cat scratch that appears
like on the so called page on the screen, scratches
through the page and then the whole thing catches fire
and burns away.

Speaker 2 (48:45):
This feels wonderfully extreme when it happens, but it makes
a lot more sense later on.

Speaker 4 (48:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:51):
So the action opens at a seaside house in Bodega Bay, California.
This was the location used for Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds
and also was used in The Fog, popular popular place
to shoot movies on the on the West Coast. And
we pan from the beach up to a seaside house
while while a woman's voice hums this plaintive melody.

Speaker 4 (49:12):
Again.

Speaker 3 (49:13):
This is the part where I was like, wait, is
that Enya? Yes, it is Enya. And one of the
first characters we see is no joke, Luke Skywalker, dressed
as a cop with aviators and a porno mustache, and
he's got like he's got blonde, his blonde hair slicked back,
and with his hair slicked back that way and the
whole way he's done up. Mark Hamill is looking like

(49:35):
Jack's from Sons of Anarchy, isn't he?

Speaker 2 (49:38):
Yeah? Yeah, I mean he looks great here. I did
not remember that he was in this. The character's name
is Sheriff Jenkins. By the way, I don't know if
they ever actually say it. He's got the name tag. Yeah,
but I like the vibe of this character. I was
kind of hoping he'd be our Loomis, you know. But
he doesn't pop up again.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
You know, he's just in the prologue. It's a cameo.
And somehow when I saw this movie when I was
I never caught that this was Mark Hamill, even though
you get a perfectly good look at him. And I
was obsessed with Star Wars. I don't know how this
went past me.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
There's a lot to distract you elsewhere in the picture,
so it's forgivable if you forget him by the end
of it.

Speaker 4 (50:17):
I guess.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
So.

Speaker 3 (50:17):
The movie's energy is so weird. A lot of things
just don't even register. So Sheriff Mark Hamill and his
deputy walk around the house and it is revealed that
there are dead cats hanging around everywhere, and the deputy
is reading off a sheet. He says, Martha and Carl Brodie,
mother and son. No one's seen them since Tuesday. The

(50:39):
car is a transam blue with yellow pin striping, and
then he gives license details and stuff, and a neighbor
lady walks up and says, god, I hope nothing horrible
has happened to them. They were so close. Oh lady,
you have no idea. So the deputy says, what do
you think happened? And Mark Hamil says, I don't.

Speaker 4 (51:01):
Know, but somebody sure doesn't like.

Speaker 3 (51:03):
Cats, as he is walking through a forest of dead
cats hanging in the air. This is one of a
number of things in the movie where I can't quite tell.
I think it is being done deliberately for comedy purposes.
But where characters just say absurdly obvious things, like there
is one part where they're walking through this yard that

(51:25):
has like a hundred cats in it, and one of
the cops says, a lot of cats. So the two
cops go inside the house with flashlights. They find more
dead cats, a bunch of blood smeared on the walls
and stuff, and then the sound of a cat moaning
inside a closet. So they slowly approach the closet and
tension builds and Mark Hamill reaches out slowly toward the

(51:48):
doorknob and then throws open the door, and then there
is a cat jump scare. Something's a little wonky about
the build up and pay off here, like the cat
jump scare is one of the most familiar things in
horror cinema. You know, you open it, you're you're scared
of something, You hear a little rattling or you know
you and you open a door and a cat jumps

(52:08):
out right now, and that's your your fake out jump scare.
But is it still a cat jump scare in spirit?
If you're already thinking about cats and the scene is
full of cats and you hear a cat me owing
on the other side of the door.

Speaker 2 (52:21):
That's true. That's true. Also, do cat jump scares occur
in the wild in real life. I've never encountered one. Generally,
I've found that if a cat is spooked, they're often
going to stay back there in that closet or wherever. Yeah,
and they're going to run about like this, only after
they have gone to the litter box.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
I don't feel like cats end up inside a closed
closet all that often. They close the door behind them.
You would have to close the door on them by accident.

Speaker 2 (52:46):
It happens all the time in my house because you
open a cabinet or something that's not open all the time.
The cat's like, it's my job to go in there
and explore, and then they get shotsy okay. But then
when you're open it, they just walk out. It's not
much of a jump scare.

Speaker 4 (52:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
But then also okay, the cops find a body, human
body in the house. It is the body of a
teenage girl, except she is shriveled up and desiccated like
a mummy. And then they like look behind her ear
and there is a single there is a rose tucked
behind her ear, and then Mark Hamill looks at the
camera and says it's a rose. Once again, it's like

(53:20):
they didn't like cats. After this, we get a credit
sequence with some mystical strings playing over images of ancient
Egyptian carvings and statuary with vaguely feline themes, and also
rob Actually, I took some screenshots of the artworks we
see in the credits here, and I wondered if you

(53:40):
had comments on anything.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Oh, I love it all. I had to watch this twice. Yeah,
went back through. I think there's just a nice selection
of images that were well put together here. I don't
know to what extent there, These are all like one
hundred percent original. There's one piece that may be a
detail from an actual pre existing work where they've been augmented,

(54:03):
but these do look and feel like pages from perhaps
that occult text that we cited at the beginning.

Speaker 4 (54:09):
Yeah, yeah, possibly.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
So we see a scene that looks like it's from
the Garden of Eden. It's like of a naked humanoid
female but with a cat head and cat face breastfeeding
a child, a human child, but the cat face is
a little too cartoony looking. For the rest of the image,
it's kind of a it's like, you know, Garfield here

(54:31):
in the mythological context, not quite that bad, but it
is sort of like that. And then there's what looks
like a photograph of a human, just fully human, embracing
a leopard body with a human head on the neck.

Speaker 2 (54:45):
Creepy.

Speaker 3 (54:46):
Yeah, they look like they're in love. And then there
is I actually did a zoom in on there's a
part where we see a book open and it's a
book full of text, and the book contains an illustration
of what it will look like later in the movie
when the sleepwalker is sucking somebody's soul out through their mouth,
where there's like, you know, purple magic coming out of

(55:06):
their mouth into the sleepwalker's mouth. But also I zoomed
in on the text here to see is this a
real text, a real book that they just did a
little edit on. No, I think they composed a fully
original book for just this shot, because I couldn't find
a match to the text anywhere, and it seems to
be text about sleepwalkers. And also, like paragraph to paragraph,

(55:27):
the text varies in whether it's trying to stay on
task and look like a real occult encyclopedia or whether
it just starts saying weird stuff, like one of the
paragraphs when you zoom in says so I said to
Juan Itita, I don't think I've ever seen anything like
this before.

Speaker 4 (55:42):
It's a cat.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
Well, it's still the presentation is good as long as
you don't pause and zoom in, right, But I've been
I love all this because it couches this idea of
the sleepwalkers in human myth in his in a sense
that sets the tone nicely. And it is worth pointing
out that even the sleepwalkers as they're presented here are

(56:07):
entirely a Stephen King creation. Cat human hybrids are very
ancient and some of the oldest creations of human culture,
and we can point to various examples from pretty much
anywhere where humans and cats have coexisted. There may ultimately
multimately be more feline cat hybrids in global mythology than

(56:30):
there are canine or wolf human hybrids and human mythology.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
Have we somehow never done an October episode about wear
cats or cat human monsters. I don't recall one.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
We should. There's plenty to talk about. You know, anywhere
tigers have ranged or lions have ranged historically, you have myths.

Speaker 3 (56:52):
Anyway, after the credits, we come back in on a
shot of a blue, two story house surrounded by trees,
with an overgrown front yard and a white picket fence,
and I just want to frame. I noticed early on
the white picket fence the pickets. I think that's what
they're called, the boards the picket fence. The pickets are
very sharp on the top, and I was like, somebody's

(57:13):
gonna get stabbed on that.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
And I was right, yep, somebody's gonna get Mortal Kombat
for sure.

Speaker 4 (57:18):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (57:20):
And a text legend tells us that this is Travis, Indiana.
So we're about to meet our sleepwalkers. Outside the house,
there is a blue trans am parked in the driveway,
so I think we know our missing mother and son
are here from the prologue. And inside the house, somebody
is listening to a record. It is again the Santo
and Johnny song sleepwalk Now, is this a good place

(57:43):
to talk about the record player? Because before we recorded
this we really went down a rabbit hole being like,
what is this thing? It seems like they have a
record player that looks like it only plays seven inch
vinyl singles, and I didn't even know that was really
a thing. You would have a player that like can't
fit a thirty three and a third record.

Speaker 2 (58:05):
Yeah, this is not something i'd seen anywhere else before.
Like friends that that I have that are Vinyl enthusiasts,
they don't have one of these. And I'm not really
I don't really know much about records, but I know
that this is a forty five. I know this is
a single, and this thing seems designed to only play singles,
and so yeah, we were talking about this like that,
Why was this, mate? What is the sense of it?

Speaker 3 (58:29):
To quote Santa Claus. Yeah, well I didn't know either.
I listened to records. I have a record collection, though
I would not call myself a record collector. I just
like I'm a music fan and have records that I like.
So I pretty much only listened to full size albums
to thirty threes and so, yeah, I did not understand
what this device was for. But I guess at some

(58:50):
point somebody wanted a record player that only played singles.

Speaker 2 (58:54):
Yeah. Yeah, JJ chimed in and had some good theories,
which I think is sly arrived at the truth. But
I also reached out to our friend and former producer
Seth Nicholas Johnson about this, because, of course, Seth, you
might remember from past appearances on the show, Big Record
Guy knows tons about the ins and outs of records

(59:15):
and how they work, and some record curios and so forth.
He makes records, He makes the technical side. Yeah, he
is a true record wizard, a vinyl wizard, if you will.
And so we reached out to him and said, Seth,
help us out what's going on here, and I want
to read what he wrote back to us. Seth writes, quote,

(59:36):
I'm going to make a strange equivalency, but it's true.
In today's modern world, there are many people whose entire
music experience is listening to singles on Spotify. This person
has never once considered listening to a full album. This
person existed in the nineteen fifties too. Their Spotify was
a jukebox. The jukebox trained these listeners that the forty

(59:57):
five rpm record was the only kind of record that mattered.
Who has the time for a twelve inch record? Not
these teeny boppers. This kind of record player, in many ways,
was the at home version of a jukebox. It can't
play a twelve inch record because why would you ever
buy a twelve inch record?

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Oh okay, this kind of makes sense to me, And
this is the opposite of one of the hypotheses I had.
I was like, is this for like the super purest
record collector who's like, oh, you still listen to albums
I only collect you know, rare singles from the fifties. No,
it sounds like Seth's idea is that. Maybe it's the opposite.
It's more for the kind of casual listener who's not

(01:00:37):
into full albums. They just like singles that they're familiar
with from you know, the radio or the jukebox.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
Yeah. Yeah, we were looking around and you can you
can buy these things used. Of course, they're asking as
astronomical prices for him these days, but I'm to assume
they were probably rather inexpensive back in the day compared
to other record player options.

Speaker 3 (01:00:56):
Anyway, in this scene, we first meet our younger Sleepwalker
played by Brian Krause. Charles Brody is his pseudonym in
the current setting in Indiana, though I don't recall if
we ever learn what their real names are, if they
even have real names, because remember that we learned in
the prologue they're using different names in California, so who knows.

(01:01:17):
When we first meet Charles, he is shirtless, listening to Sleepwalk,
sitting there in acid wash jeans with a belt, looking
through a high school yearbook. I guess this is the
high school where he is now undercover as a student,
and he's just playing with a pocket knife. He takes
a moment to carve the letter T into his arm,
and then we cut down to the yearbook to see

(01:01:39):
a picture of our human protagonist, Tanya Robertson. Presumably that's
what the tea is for Tanya. And he even he
drew a heart with an arrow through it around her picture, which, okay,
how did he get the yearbook already? Like he just
moved there and he's already got a yearbook? Is it
maybe from the year before? I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Maybe this is how they select talents. They just get
the finished to get a hold of the yearbooks, and
you know, they treat them like a menu.

Speaker 3 (01:02:05):
Yeah, Tanya's in a lot of clubs, by the way,
she's National Merit Scholar, Science Fair, Photography club president, a
lot of stuff. But also there's a little easter egg.
If you look at a screenshot of the yearbook. You
can see from the student next to her that the
high school teams in Travis are the hell Cats.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
Oh nice.

Speaker 3 (01:02:25):
In the scene, we also meet Charles's mother, Mary, played
by Alice Kriega. She is busy looking out the window
with deep concern. She is watching a stray cat prowl
around in the yard and the cat almost gets caught
in a steel trap that they've set out and baited
with some blob of meat. So their yard is just

(01:02:45):
full of animal traps like the you know, the bear
traps style.

Speaker 4 (01:02:51):
But the cat does not get caught.

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
It gets away this time, and Mary is obviously distressed
by the presence of a cat. This establishes the idea
that everywhere the Sleepwalkers go their house is gradually surrounded
by a sort of posse of stray cats that are
hunting them.

Speaker 2 (01:03:09):
Now, at this point in the film, we don't know
all of this yet. You could even maybe just suppose
that she has some sort of phobia of cats or something,
But yeah, this seems to be the case. Wherever they go,
cats will accumulate until they build up enough critical mass
to assault the Sleepwalkers and overcome them. You know, cats

(01:03:30):
are wise and ancient sentinels against the darkness and will
dispatch supernatural creatures that are their sworn enemies. This is
something we see in various weird fiction works, and I'm
sure the idea that's its roots ultimately and very ancient traditions,
you know, because cats are weird. They are allies, but

(01:03:50):
they're also up to their own business, and their own
business might include slaying monsters.

Speaker 3 (01:03:55):
Now, there are a lot of themes in this movie
where you could argue about how good it was for
the story, or people can raise their eyebrows at I
think it is a pretty objectively cool premise to have
monsters where one of their core features is that they
are pursued by stray cats. Just cats gather from all around.

Speaker 4 (01:04:14):
To hunt them.

Speaker 2 (01:04:15):
Yeah, I like it.

Speaker 3 (01:04:16):
But also though, speaking of weird themes, in this scene already,
the movie starts cranking up the weirdness really fast into
the edipal cat sex zone. Charles and Mary start dancing
around to the song. They're doing twirls and dips, and
they start talking about how Charles plans to go to
the movies tonight because he is hoping to meet a
particular girl in town.

Speaker 4 (01:04:37):
This is Tanya.

Speaker 3 (01:04:38):
Mary keeps asking is she nice, meaning like, can we
steal her soul? And they banter a bit and he
starts asking his mother, are you jealous? And she says concerned,
And by the end of the scene they are kissing
and running up to the bedroom and then we cut
to a shot from outside the house and there is
neon violet light pulse sing from the bedroom window. Well,

(01:05:02):
a cat looks on from the front yard. Is this
weird enough for you, folks?

Speaker 2 (01:05:06):
The cat is like Sleepwalker's confirmed. Please please alert the
others with the assault begins in five days. But yes,
this is so weird and like in you know, intentionally
off putting obviously, you know, engaging in taboos, but also
just very weird for a mainstream even a mainstream horror
picture that was like the number one picture, like the

(01:05:28):
week it came out.

Speaker 3 (01:05:29):
Like oh really, oh if you already said that, it
went by me. I didn't realize it had been that successful.

Speaker 2 (01:05:35):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it was. You know, I don't
think it was like one of the top blockbusters of
the year or anything, but it was a successful picture.

Speaker 3 (01:05:41):
So next we go to the movie theater to meet Tanya,
and you can see on the Marquee they're playing two movies.
One is called They Bite and the other is called
Scream Dreams. I feel like you could have worked on
some more creative, funny titles there.

Speaker 2 (01:05:54):
I don't know. I like They Bite. Like I was
trying to figure out what is it about. You think
it's about ticks, about bed bugs. I don't know. Something bites,
or maybe it's something that's not supposed to bite, like shoes.

Speaker 3 (01:06:07):
Maybe it's about computers with a b iy kind.

Speaker 2 (01:06:11):
Of and they actually bite, like dis drive floppy drives
could come after you little mounds. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
Yeah, So Tanya works at the concession stand in the lobby,
and when we first catch up with her, she's vacuuming
the carpet and she's rocking out to Do You Love
Me by the contours on her headphones. And you know,
this made me realize I am just a sucker for
a scene where a character who thinks they're alone dances

(01:06:38):
to music in their headphones. There's a great scene, I guess,
especially in a horror movie. There's a great scene of
this in the two thousand and nine Thy West movie
House of the Devil, where the main character dances around
a cursed house. Listening to one thing leads to another
by the fix on her Walkman, I don't know why,
I just I love these scenes. I mean, I guess

(01:06:59):
particularly horror because it like it makes a character endearing
to get to witness them having joy, but the fact
that they're listening with the headphones on makes them vulnerable
in a way because they're not aware of their environment.
So at the same time you get to see them
happy and care free, but also in a kind of

(01:07:21):
danger they're unaware of.

Speaker 2 (01:07:23):
Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. On top of just
you know, music being a great way to establish something
that your character likes in a way that's wordless, like
here's the music they like. Now you get it, right,
We don't even have to describe it to you. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:37):
And as we've mentioned already, Tanya is I think a
very easily likable protagonist. Like it's hard to be on
the monster side against Tanya, right, But anyway, while she's
dancing to the contour, she bumps into Charles in the
lobby and she gets a good scare. She like leaps
back into a popcorn stand which has a bunch of
loose boxes of popcorn stored on top, and they still all.

Speaker 4 (01:07:58):
Over the place.

Speaker 3 (01:07:59):
You got popcorn, hair, Why would you store the popcorn
that way?

Speaker 2 (01:08:02):
Yeah, they should go in the bot right, there should
be a place to store them in there so they're warm,
That's what.

Speaker 3 (01:08:06):
Yeah, you would think so, But of course it's a
meet cute. Charles is again a like one hundred watts
super hunk.

Speaker 4 (01:08:14):
So Tanya is.

Speaker 3 (01:08:15):
Immediately smitten and she's very flustered, and he introduces himself.
They talk about how he's new in town and how
they have a creative writing class together at school. He says,
with mister Fallows, the weird and the terrible, And this
made me think I would like to draw up a
list of Stephen King's stories where he inserts the character

(01:08:36):
of a bizarre and sometimes evil creative writing teacher who
is obsessed with the macabre, like, ah, yes, you know
our fourth period writing workshop with Professor Freevan Fring. And
I can't think of other examples right now, but I
have a sense that he does this often, and it's
kind of the opposite of the standard narcissistic author avatar

(01:08:58):
who can do no wrong. Instead, it's like the author
avatar here is somebody who's really creepy and loathsome hmmm.

Speaker 2 (01:09:06):
I'd have to go back and think about that. I mean,
obviously there are a lot of author protagonists in his
novels as well, but that's true.

Speaker 3 (01:09:15):
I guess the Shining Yeah, creative writing professor and author
protagonist too.

Speaker 2 (01:09:19):
Yeah, but generally, you know, the Shining being an extreme
example of this. They are off, they're often far from perfect. Ye, there,
they're more they're ultimately kind of like the Stephen King
idea of a working class best selling author. Yeah, yes,
which is kind of like that's King's image, Like that's
what you kind of think of, is like like liberal,
working man, best selling author. Yeah, and professional weirdo. Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:09:44):
Also, the protagonist in Salem's Lot is an author, that's right.
I don't think he's a creative writing teacher though.

Speaker 2 (01:09:50):
Yeah. But then you know, like the Dark Half, that's
another author. One of the kids in it. Sorry I'm
blinking on all their names. One of them is an author. Yeah,
over and over again.

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Anyway, Charles, here, he tries to buy a popcorn and
a medium mister pib but Tanya Tanya like, so he
asked for it to put some money on the counter,
and then Tanya like looks around and she gives it
to him on the house. Oh she's a lawbreaker, and
theater owners watch out, don't hire Tanya. But Charles claims

(01:10:22):
to have just moved to town from a different place
called Paradise Falls, Ohio. And while I know you cannot
actually tell what state a person is from by looking
at them, Charles is not from Ohio. Do they have
surfing in Ohio? Like you've never seen somebody who looks
as much like a Beach Boys song as Brian Krause.

(01:10:46):
But anyway, they so they have a conversation. They flirt,
and Tanya is not being subtle. She's like, Oh, where's
your girlfriend? Do you have a girlfriend? Isn't it weird
that we're both twenty five but still in high school?
And he he offers her a ride home, but she
does not accept, and she says like, oh, I'm getting
a ride home with Lyman Ward. And also I noticed

(01:11:07):
this weird framing where like, while they're flirting at the
concession stand, there is a huge multicolored sign behind Tanya's head.

Speaker 4 (01:11:14):
That says slush.

Speaker 3 (01:11:16):
I don't know that's to suggest her her heart is
melting like a slushy. But anyway, after the movie, Tanya's
dad picks her up, and then we see Charles watching
from the shadows outside the theater and he's muttering Tanya,
and the Enya starts playing again and the mood gets
very dark, but then it gets weirdly funny again because

(01:11:38):
Charles walks back home. He's walking up the drive to
the side door and there's there's a something like a
jump scare, but it's a flashlight scare because a cop
is there collecting stray cats in a big burlap sack.
And Mary comes to the doorway to thank the officer
for his help. She says, I would come out and
thank you, but my allergy is so severe, and then

(01:11:58):
the cop says, yeah, I got one and two.

Speaker 4 (01:12:00):
Mine's the irs allergic to the irs. Yuck yucky.

Speaker 3 (01:12:10):
Then the cop leaves and Charles and Mary have a
debrief like she dwells on the menace of the gathering cats.
Charles reports on his attempt to steal Tanya's life for us.
He didn't get it yet, so Mary becomes enraged. She's like,
I'm famished, Charles, and she starts swatting at him like
an irritable kitty cat and then again just more off

(01:12:31):
the charts edible cat weirdness in this scene.

Speaker 2 (01:12:41):
So we have teenage characters. We've got to go to
high school. We've got to have some scenes in the school.
And that's where we head to next.

Speaker 3 (01:12:47):
Right, right time to check in on that creative writing
class with mister Fallows, the Weird and Terrible. So today
in class, as luck would have it, Charles is reading
aloud from a short story he wrote called Sleepwalkers. I
transcribed it because it's good.

Speaker 4 (01:13:05):
So this is the story. He says.

Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
They were sleepwalkers hiding in human robes, feeding on virtue,
loving to feed, feeding to breed. In the end, they ran.
In the end, Robbie and his mother always had to
run for one night. The men would come in their
old cars, men with lights and guns, and to the
boy and his mother, their curses and their screams of

(01:13:30):
rage always sound the same, like the laughter of cruel gods.
The time of happiness too brief to be anything, but
golden had run out. And I guess that's the end.
And people start clapping. Actually, Tanya starts clapping alone before
everybody else. Despite the fact that this story seems to
be a detailed description of how Charles plans to eat

(01:13:53):
her soul and then regurgitate it to his mom.

Speaker 2 (01:13:58):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like just a straight up confession of
all the crimes that he and his mom have committed.

Speaker 4 (01:14:05):
I on their cover a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:14:08):
Someone with a little better ear for King's pros might
also have some insight here. I wonder if this is
maybe a little insight into what Sleepwalker's the novel by
Stephen King, might have tasted a little bit like maybe,
I don't know, it feels a well.

Speaker 3 (01:14:29):
I mean, I guess this is supposed to have been
written by a high schooler, But then again, it was
supposed to have been written by a high schooler who
was actually maybe centuries.

Speaker 4 (01:14:36):
Or millennia old.

Speaker 3 (01:14:37):
Yeah, but then again, maybe it is written. There's like
three levels of deception. It is written by an actual author,
but it's supposed to sound like a high schooler, but
it's actually an ancient being who is trying to sound
like a high schooler.

Speaker 2 (01:14:52):
Yeah, wouldn't it be something if this were an actual
snippet from something King wrote as a high schooler, though,
something you know, unpublished.

Speaker 3 (01:15:01):
Oh that would be good. But remember so mister Follows.
The teacher is played by Glenn Shaddocks from Like Beetlejuice
and so Glenn Shaddocks is. He's like, very good, mister Brady,
if that is.

Speaker 4 (01:15:13):
Your real name.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
He's overtly suspicious of him already. He's like asking him
questions about didn't you say you came from Ohio? And
Charles is like, what do what? Now?

Speaker 2 (01:15:24):
Where?

Speaker 3 (01:15:27):
But mister Follows, we see he's one of these teachers
who runs his classroom like a petty tyrant. He likes
to swat students with the ruler if he catches them
drawing naughty sketches. And he tells one student, you must
learn to keep your hands to yourself.

Speaker 4 (01:15:43):
Remember that.

Speaker 3 (01:15:44):
But anyway, the class goes on to discuss the story.
Tanya says that she likes the story. She thinks it's
sad because the sleepwalkers are outsiders. They're always driven away,
and this leads into a moment where mister Follows says, now,
we all understand that story has to have a beginning,
a middle, and an end, but that's like saying a

(01:16:05):
box has four sides. And then Charles interrupts him and says, actually,
mister fellows a box has six sides. Ooh, pretty good,
but not only that, like the class laughs and one
guy goes busted to the extreme. So mister Follows is
clearly embarrassed and angry now, and so after school we

(01:16:28):
see him staring out the window at Charles, simmering with rage.
He's plotting his revenge. And from here I guess we
are starting to run a little bit short on time,
so we shoul maybe skip more lightly over the plot
machinations and just focus on some of the highlight scenes.
So there's a scene between Tanya and her friends where
they all talk about how dreamy Charles is, and then

(01:16:48):
Charles shows up to offer Tanya a ride home in
his trans am. They go to Tanya's house where he
walks around her room and he gets to know her
a little bit, like he looks at her photos. She
has a photography hobby. We saw in the yearbook that
she's in the president of the photography club, And there's
one point where they like look at a black and
white photo of rocks and he says, I like rocks.

(01:17:09):
There is also a cheesy gag where her room is
essentially made of underwear and she's like running around trying
to hide it all before Charles sees it. But Charles
then also meets Tanya's mother, who has a hobby of
her own, gravestone rubbings. I would love to know how
this made it into the story, but gravestone rubbings. And

(01:17:32):
it comes out to the mother that Charles and Tanya
have made plans the following day to go to a
cemetery in town called home Land. This is a big
set piece, so the teenage characters talk about it, and
this is quite at once a red flag to the
mom because it is understood to be the town makeout spot.

(01:17:52):
But Charles is very smooth. He manages to cover for
them by saying their plan is actually to go there
to do grave rubs, again, the mom's favorite hobby, which
for some reason he knows a lot about. Like she
tries to catch him in a lie like asking questions
like do you use powder or stick?

Speaker 4 (01:18:08):
And I don't know he knows how to answer that
for some reason.

Speaker 2 (01:18:11):
Yeah, yeah, there's some some rubbing jokes shoehorned in here
that land reasonably well.

Speaker 3 (01:18:18):
Yeah, So after this we get the I believe the
first monster murder in the movie. Charles is driving down
the highway, just blasting rock music in the trans am
when he is suddenly almost run off the road by
someone in a white Volkswagen, so he pulls over, and
why it is mister Follows. The creative writing teacher Follows

(01:18:40):
comes up and tries to menace Charles by suggesting that
he knows he's using a fake identity and that his
transcripts were forged, and it's implied that he's trying to
do some kind of sexual blackmail against Charles. But Charles
turns the tables and he goes cat mode, so like
like Glenn Shaddick's leaning over him, and then Charles rips

(01:19:02):
off his hand, gives it back to him and he's like,
you're right, mister Follows. We should learn to keep our
hands to ourselves. Here's yours.

Speaker 2 (01:19:11):
Yeah. This is the first of many scenes where we
get to see that the Sleepwalkers can tear human bodies
apart like their well cooked pork at any moment.

Speaker 4 (01:19:20):
Yeah, shredded.

Speaker 3 (01:19:21):
Yeah, so I have a question actually about sleepwalker biology
because after this, Glen Shaddocks runs into the woods and
Charles runs after him in cat mode. He's got a
lie in face and he kills him in the woods,
and it suggests that he eats him, like where we
see from above where Glen Shattocks is lying on the
ground and Charles is above him, like doing that thing

(01:19:45):
you see in monster movies sometimes where the monster predator
type being is just sort of shaking their face over
the victim's throat. But this implies I think that Charles
eats him, like physically eats his flesh, which is not
what he plans to do to Tanya. Once again, the
life force that they are stealing, their planning to steal

(01:20:06):
from Tanya comes in the form of sucking purple magic
out of her breath, like out through her mouth, from
her lungs. This just seems like he's eating the guy.
And I don't know if they also normally just eat people.

Speaker 2 (01:20:20):
Well, mom is cooking a chicken dinner later, I believe
they eat regular food. Yeah, so maybe there's like a
sustenance for their physical bodies and then some greater sustenance
they require. Another theory I had is that eventually we
see that mom Mary has additional powers well beyond that

(01:20:42):
of her son, and it makes one wonder if essentially
she is some sort of an ancient god like being
and he is her demi god offspring, or he is
her monstrous offspring that helps her and serves her. But
she clearly has some greater accumulated power and maybe that's
where the need for souls comes into play. Oh so what.

Speaker 3 (01:21:04):
If it's more like the Hunger, Like she's the Catherine
Denov character and Charles is the David Bowie character.

Speaker 2 (01:21:10):
Yeah, something like that. I mean, ultimately, it's all monster
business and we are we're not supposed to understand it.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
So the next scene we get. The next big scene
is the police chase, which is great because it's where
we first meet the actor Dan Martin playing Deputy Andy
Simpson and his loyal police cat Clovis. So when we
first joined them, they are staked out on the highway,
parked beside the edge of the road, playing with one
of those dangle toys, and the coffin is saying he's like,

(01:21:38):
come on, boy, get the bad guy for daddy, get
that mffort, and Clovis, the cat is just swatting with
pleasure at the toy and it's adorable.

Speaker 2 (01:21:47):
Yeah. Clovis has a little tag that says, what clovis
the attack cat. I think that is right.

Speaker 3 (01:21:55):
But meanwhile, while they're playing here in the in the car,
Charles zooms by in his car at a million miles
per hour and Deputy Andy joins in hot pursuit. So
this turns into a whole car chase scene that goes
all over the place. So I'm just gonna mention some
elements of it. One is the shredding wee wall guitars

(01:22:15):
to like, never let up.

Speaker 4 (01:22:17):
Those are really good.

Speaker 3 (01:22:19):
Another thing is that Charles seems to know a lot
of stunt driving tricks. He's an experienced driver. And at
one point they're like going through a school bus crossing
where children are going across the street, and you know,
they both see that they're approaching this, and Charles like
looks at the kids and then just smiles before revving
the engine even harder. Fortunately no children are harmed. We

(01:22:42):
see like the crossing guard pulls the kid out of
the way before Charles comes through. But it's like that
scene in the Simpsons episode where there's like the true
crime creep movie about Homer starring Dennis Franz, you know,
and the girl goes no, mister Simpson. A cat is
a living creature. Dennis France I.

Speaker 2 (01:22:58):
Don't care, I remember that, yeah, But.

Speaker 3 (01:23:02):
Anyway, Finally, Deputy Andy pulls up beside Charles in pursuit,
so they're driving beside each other on the road, and
at first Charles just laughs and gives him the finger,
but then Clovis the cat pops up into the window,
and this causes Charles to not only freak out, but
to go into random morphin mode, where he cycles through
like a dozen different kinds of heads that he has available,

(01:23:25):
and the deputy witnesses all of the heads morphin and
he gets weirded out. Rob Just below this in the outline,
I've attached here a selection of some of the heads
he goes through. This is not all of them. He
has like a little boy human head, he has like
sort of a kitten head, he has sort of a
lion head, and then he has more kind of weird

(01:23:47):
gummy rubbery monster creature heads that are a little bit
cat like but also just sort of like gray aliens
with huge black eyes. Then more of a gargoyle head
with big pointy ears like elf ears, then more of
a gargole oil head with a large cranium.

Speaker 4 (01:24:01):
It's just all over the place.

Speaker 2 (01:24:03):
It is an amazing sequence and you can pause it
at any moment and just be enthralled by what you're given. Yeah,
it's like Clovis has jumped to attention. Clovis is like, Dad,
I'm on this. I see what this is. And he's like,
oh crap, I'm busted by the cats. Yes, it freaks out.
It's wonderful.

Speaker 3 (01:24:22):
And the deputy witnesses all the heads he's weirded out
by it. But Charles finally escapes the situation by pulling
off road. And then this is one of the sleepwalker powers.
He can concentrate and do what they call making himself
in the car dim. So sleepwalkers have the power to
turn themselves and their vehicles invisible.

Speaker 2 (01:24:44):
Kay. This is kind of a callback to King's book
Eyes of the Dragon, in which there is an invisibility
spell that one of the characters utilizes. And it's just
I don't know if he uses dim in that description,
but there's this. He has a nice description of how
it doesn't completely make you invisible, but kind of yeah,
makes you dim and people miss you and all here

(01:25:07):
though it is visually just the car straight up turns invisible.

Speaker 3 (01:25:11):
And then afterwards he's able to transform it into a
different kind of car. It's like a different color and
different model.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
I have more questions about that the car transformation later,
but we get that scene where Simpson pulls off the road.
He thinks he's lost him, but of course Clovis sees him.
Clovis is staring right at the car. The invisibility trick
does not work on the feeline Ancient Enemies of the Sleepwalkers.

Speaker 3 (01:25:36):
And Charles is yelling at the cat. He's like, get
out of your cat.

Speaker 2 (01:25:40):
But we get a great shot here at Clovis in
the window of the squad car with the with the shotgun.
You know how they store the shotgun in the squad car,
like pointing up right behind it. It really looks like
Officer Clovis is on the job here. I love it.

Speaker 3 (01:25:56):
Yeah, So some big scenes in the movie after this.
Of course, there's the scene where Charles and Tanya have
their date to go to the cemetery. So they're going
off to Homeland and the date starts off very flirty
and fun, but of course at some point it's gonna
have to to turn evil, and so there at one

(01:26:16):
point they start kissing and then Charles just suddenly begins
sucking her soul out, and he shifts very abruptly from
his charming mode and maybe kind of a subtle menacing
charm just into full late Elm Street sequel Freddy Krueger
mode where he's making jokes like he's like, it doesn't
have to hurt Tanya. Okay, I lied, it does have

(01:26:38):
to hurt.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
Yeah, And this whole sequence feels very out of keeping
with where everywhere we'd gone thus far. Yeah, there was this,
There was a great scene but shortly before this where
where we go by we go by the house and
Tanya meets Mary, and I rather like that sequence where
Mary's being like almost overtly hostile to her and like

(01:27:03):
brandishing these big scissors and all. And at that point
my wife watched part of this with me. She'd seen
it back in the day, and she was like, well,
why don't they just eat her soul here? Like, now's
the time? Good question, It is a great question. I
think this is ultimately a plot hole. I guess if
you're being generous, you might say, well, it has to
come from maybe their feeding has to come from a

(01:27:23):
place of seduction, But that only seems initially meat.

Speaker 4 (01:27:28):
To use a term from it.

Speaker 2 (01:27:29):
Maybe if that is true, it seems to be only
initially true because in this whole sequence with the Freddy
Krueger ring and the chasing around, like he's just overtly
attacking her. Yeah, and it seems like any necessity of
seduction is just completely out the window.

Speaker 3 (01:27:45):
And he's making jokes about it. That's the Freddy Krugery thing.
Like she she defends herself, like she repeatedly wounds Charles
as they fight, but he just kind of keeps popping
back up. At one point, she stabs him in the
eye with.

Speaker 4 (01:27:56):
A cork scull. Oh yes, yes, and.

Speaker 3 (01:27:59):
Then he falls down and then he goes, just look
at my shirt, Tanya, mother is gonna kill me.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):
Yeah. Where did this all come from?

Speaker 5 (01:28:08):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (01:28:09):
But here in this scene we we get a payback
where Deputy Andy, Simpson and Clovis turn up once again.
They show up to the rescue. They notice the blue
trans am parked outside the cemetery, and they arrive on
the scene. Deputy Andy tries to help Tanya, but unfortunately
Charles shows up and stabs him in the ear with
a pencil. I think the pencil they were going to

(01:28:30):
use to do the grave rubbings and then declares him
a kop kabob because I guess there's a stick running.

Speaker 2 (01:28:37):
Through Yeah, okay, it's unfortunate.

Speaker 3 (01:28:42):
But remember that sleepwalkers are vulnerable to the deadly scratch
of a cat, and so also in the scene Clovis
comes to the rescue, he attacks Charles, scratching him and
this seems to sort of drain Charles's power to heal
himself and drains his resiliency. He desperately flees the scene
in his car, going back home to his mother and

(01:29:03):
she takes care of his wounds.

Speaker 2 (01:29:05):
And we get that heartbreaking scene though, of Clovis comes
over to his dead master and sits on Deputy Simpson's chest,
and it's in this moment that Clovis swears eternal vengeance
against sleepwalkers, like it was his ancient duty as a
cat to kill sleepwalkers previously, but now it is personal.

Speaker 3 (01:29:25):
The cat morning scene, I was genuinely moved, and it
comes right after kop Kabob.

Speaker 2 (01:29:29):
Yeah, so, at this point our monster has been Beowulf.
He has been brutally injured by Tanya and by Clovis,
and like Grendel in the story of Beowulf returns home to.

Speaker 3 (01:29:49):
The lair, right, so in the aftermath of the attack,
this is probably the place we should mention that. There
are just tons of cameos, like all of the author
and horror world cameos of people showing up I guess
at the crime scene. So this is where you get
Stephen King wandering around telling everybody like, look, I'm not
responsible for every pervert who comes in this cemetery.

Speaker 4 (01:30:11):
I don't need this kind of action.

Speaker 2 (01:30:13):
Yeah, and let's see who else do we get in
this scene. I believe Clive Barker is on the case
as a forensic tech. Yes, yeah, well you know, Stephen
King once said I have seen the future of horror
and his name is Clive Barker, so you know here
he is here. Yeah, indeed, I believe Toby Hooper is
also on the case. Here is another forensic tech.

Speaker 4 (01:30:35):
Amazing.

Speaker 2 (01:30:36):
Yeah, and let's see, I'm trying. I think we we're
gonna get a couple of more later, but I'll go
ahead and mention them now. We're gonna get a scene
later where we're you know, doing the autopsies and so
you know, lab technician work, and that's where we're gonna
get lab technician John Landis, We're gonna get lab assistant
Joe Dante, and we're also going to get Cynthia Garris,

(01:30:58):
who is of course Mike Garris's.

Speaker 3 (01:31:00):
Wife Grammon so much in So Fast And also I
think the you know, ninety nine percent of the people
who see these movies would not have recognized who these people.

Speaker 2 (01:31:10):
Were, right, this is this was for the horror fans.
I think this is for the horror geeks. I mean, honestly,
I didn't even recognize Clive Barker at first, and I
was on the lookout for him. He's so young in this,
I'm just not used to seeing him this yet.

Speaker 4 (01:31:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:31:25):
Okay, but so here we're accelerating toward the ending. So
the movie concludes basically with Mary turning into Grendel's mom
and going on a revenge to her. She decides to
go to the Robertson home for revenge and to bring
Tanya back so that she and Charles can both feed
on Tanya. But the scene where she attacks the Robertson

(01:31:47):
home this is also one of these crazy tonal whiplash
scenes because you get like, oh, you know, parents grieving
for like their child being in danger, like this consciousness
of the more of their child and their child's suffering,
and it's I don't know, it's like a horrible thing
to imagine, and it's really tender the way the movie
deals with those kind of relationships. But then also Mary

(01:32:10):
shows up and starts stabbing people to death with a
corn cob and saying like, no vegetables, no dessert.

Speaker 4 (01:32:16):
It's just off the wall.

Speaker 2 (01:32:19):
But again, Alice Kreega is so good that I still
I buy it. I lap it all up.

Speaker 3 (01:32:24):
This is also the part of the movie where we
meet Ron Pearlman, and Ron Pearlman tries to stop Alice
Kriega from fleeing the scene and kidnapping Tanya, but she
thwarts him by biting off his fingers and he screams
in pain. And then there is an amazing moment where
she takes I think is Ron Pearlman's Revolver and then

(01:32:48):
shoots the police cars so they explode in a fireball,
each one bullet fireball.

Speaker 2 (01:32:53):
She one shots each of the of the cop cars,
just a perfect Marksman full terminator mode.

Speaker 3 (01:33:00):
Yeah, so Mary kidnaps Tanya takes her back to Casa
Day Sleepwalker, where the cats have amassed in great, great numbers.
Now they're overwhelming presence of cats outside and Mary comes
up with a clever way to get inside because otherwise
she'd have to go through the yard and there are
too many cats. So she drives the police car that
they stole through the wall into the house and then

(01:33:23):
takes Tanya inside. She's trying to get the weak wounded
Charles to suck out Tanya's soul, but the monsters are
foiled yet again, this time by a combination of cop
and cat. The one cop left the sheriff, basically the
the one non comedy relief cop shows up and is
like trying to help. He blows off the door and

(01:33:44):
comes in to interfere. Of course, Mary ends up skewering
him on the picket fence outside, but also the cats.
It's just too much cats now. They can't overcome the
power of cats and the cats. The cats win the day.

Speaker 2 (01:33:57):
The cats have decided that critical mass have been reached.
Clovis is here. Clovis leads the charge in through I
believe one of the upstairs windows. Yeah, and they're surging
in before she can the soul suck, before the the
you know, the partial resurrection can be achieved. And yeah,
this is where we learn where we learned this already,
but now we get to see it in action. That cats,

(01:34:20):
when they're clawing, especially in great number at the sleepwalkers,
their cuts like actually cause burns to the sleepwalker's flesh.

Speaker 3 (01:34:29):
Yes, like the like in the scratch through at the
text at the beginning. Yeah, and so in the end,
Tanya escapes the scene with Clovis in the police car
as as the last of the Sleepwalkers go up in
flames from all of the cat scratches. They've got cat
scratch fever, very bad. And so yeah, they drive away,

(01:34:50):
or they don't drive away. She actually like backs the
car up into a tree, so they drive away by
about fifty feet and then she's just sitting in the
car with Clovis. In the last line of the movie
is Tanya saying, it's just you and me now, Clovis.

Speaker 2 (01:35:05):
Oh man, so good, so good. I loved ever been
of this film, even more bonkers than I remember. It's
got some very fun performances in it, lots of cat action. Yeah,
don't listen to the critics from the early nineties. They
didn't know what they add.

Speaker 3 (01:35:23):
Any more business to address about sleepwalkers before we wrap
it up today.

Speaker 2 (01:35:27):
Oh man, I don't know. We probably didn't do the
terminator rampage complete justice because it is just it just
comes out of nowhere and then it doesn't stop. Yes,
and yeah, the corn cob stabbing, picket fencing, finger eating.
There's a lot of cool telekinesis and her you think
that her son is dead and she's like, you must
dance with him, and she's gonna, like, at first, it

(01:35:50):
seems like she's gonna telekinetically resurrect him and just kind
of puppet him around and make her dance with him.
But then he revives to some extent. So there's a
lot of a lot of even kingsy horror packed into
those last twenty minutes or so.

Speaker 4 (01:36:04):
Yeah, they kind of.

Speaker 3 (01:36:07):
When she first shows up and is like trying to
make Charles dance with her, it's kind of Texas chainsaw
like Grandpa was a one hitter kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:36:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:36:14):
Yeah, but no, I think Charles is still alive. They
kind of they're kind of faking her out right, like
he does sort of end up sucking the purple juice out.

Speaker 2 (01:36:23):
I mean, I feel like he's about dead.

Speaker 4 (01:36:25):
Yeah, yeah, he is about dead.

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):
Yeah, but a little soul sucking would fix things if
they were able to pull it off. But thankfully they
are not able to do so.

Speaker 3 (01:36:35):
Tanya keeps her soul and gains a new friend in Clovis. Yeah,
unclear if her to be a little more bid, if
her family is still alive. I don't think they result
Her parents are at least what.

Speaker 2 (01:36:48):
They did not. Yeah, we didn't get a clear I
think we see Dad is still breathing. Mom is like
in a heap on the in the front yard. Who knows. Yeah,
it's possible that some some cats came in to like
lick them back back into back to health. You know,
because the cats are on the case. It's possible.

Speaker 4 (01:37:05):
Oh, they can't say.

Speaker 3 (01:37:07):
If you've ever seen Catwoman with Halle Berry, cats can
save you from mortal wounds, sort of climbing up on
you and breathing in your face.

Speaker 2 (01:37:14):
It's close enough. I'll accept it. Yeah, I guess my
hope here Clovis survives, Tanya survives. I think what happens
clearly is that Tanya is going to go on to
coach a women's basketball team, and Clovis is going to
be the mascot, and somewhere out there in the world
there is one more surviving Sleepwalker, and that sleepwalker wants revenge.

(01:37:38):
I don't know where the rest goes. We'll have to
ask Tabitha King about that, but I want to see it.

Speaker 4 (01:37:43):
That's good though.

Speaker 3 (01:37:44):
I thought you were going to say Tanya becomes like Buffy,
the vampire slayer, but the Sleepwalker slayer, she has to
hunt them all around. I guess in Buffy they always
come to her. They come to her town, don't they.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
Yeah, yeah, I mean it works out like they were
over a hell mouth, so it makes sense. All right. Well,
that is Stephen King's sleep Walkers. Obviously, we'd love to
hear from everyone out there regarding this film, but also
Stephen king movies in general. What are some of your favorites,
Do you have some guilty pleasures and so forth? All
of that is fair game. We'd like to remind everyone

(01:38:17):
out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays. On Wednesdays we do a short form episode,
and on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
You can follow us on Instagram at STBYM podcast. It's
a great way to keep track of what's coming out,
you know, certainly follow us wherever you get your podcast episodes,

(01:38:40):
and if you just want to keep up with Weird
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Speaker 3 (01:38:51):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
topic for the few future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
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Speaker 1 (01:39:12):
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