“Sleepwalkers” is a classic story of a teenager who bangs his mom. Charles Brady (Brian Krause) and his mother Mary (Alice Krige) are ancient shape-shifting energy vampires. They also have sex with each other. Most of the time, they look like attractive humans, but their true forms resemble giant bipedal sphinx cats — you know, those weird felines with no fur. Picture that, but huge, and horny, and you get the idea. As “Sleepwalkers” begins, Charles and Mary have fled California after killing a young girl. Now, they’re in the small town of Travis, which is located in flat Indiana even though every shot of the place shows the mountains of California.
Charles is an ancient energy vampire (side-note: it’s very funny that an ancient energy vampire is named “Charles”), but he also attends high school, just like the vamps in “Twilight.” Now enrolled in classes, Charles — who, like King, has a predilection for writing stories — has set his sights on classmate Tanya (Mädchen Amick), who works as a “popcorn girl” at the local movie theater. Charles plans to suck the energy out of Tanya and then transfer it, via sex, to his mother. I should add that I’m not making any of this up, I swear. This is a real movie. And it’s perhaps a testament to Stephen King’s popularity in the ’90s that a movie with this premise exists at all.
King was unstoppable at this point — any book that boasted his name was bound to be a best-seller, and Hollywood very much wanted to be in the Stephen King business. So much so that we got movies like “The Lawnmower Man,” which has absolutely nothing to do with the King short story that inspired it but was sold under the premise of being a Stephen King adaptation (King actually successfully sued to have his name taken off the picture). It was junk like “Lawnmower Man” that partially inspired King to write an original screenplay, and the fact that this is what he came up with — a movie about horny mother and son cat monsters who have sex with each other — and got away with it is kind of incredible. Even if you don’t like the finished film, you have to admire its audacity.