Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Charles Brady and his mother, Mary, are the last of a dying breed whose needs are not of this world. They are Sleepwalkers - able to stay alive only by feeding on the life-force of the innocent, but destined to roam the earth, avoiding discovery while searching for their next victim. That search takes them to the sleepy little town of Travis, Indiana, where beautiful teenager Tanya Robertson is about to become an unwilling pawn in their nightmarish fight for survival.
Sleepwalkers is a Stephen King original screenplay with a genuinely odd mythology — shape-shifting cat-people with an incestuous mother-son dynamic — that gives it a distinctive, trashy pulp quality you won't find elsewhere. The creature concept and black humor are inventive enough to lift Novelty above average. Cinematography is competent genre work with some effective visual moments. However, the plot loses coherence in the third act and the characters are thinly drawn, dragging Plot and Acting into below-average territory. The ending is messy and unsatisfying, deflating tension rather than paying it off. Overall a curiosity piece that earns its cult status more through weirdness than craft.