Crew
Director – Turi Meyer, Screenplay – Al Septien & Turi Meyer, Producer – Luigi Cingolani, Photography – Michael G. Wojciechowski, Music – Jim Manzie, Digital Effects – Intrazone Interactive, Ltd. & Chris Walker, Makeup Effects – Image Animation International (Supervisor – Gary J. Tunnicliffe), Production Design – Arlan Jay Vetter. Production Company – Intrazone/Luigi Cingalone.
Cast
Jay Underwood (Griffin Davis), Kathryn Morris (Megan), Michael Harris (The Sandman), William Lucking (Detective Bronson Worth), Michael D. Roberts (The Preacher), Kathleen McMartin (Dana), Peter Mark Vasquez (Dog Sanchez), A.L. Glassman (Kenny), Ken Foree (Detective Rolands), Vincent Berry (Griffin Age 7), Marc McClure (Dad), Caryn Richman (Mom), Barry Lynch (Pierson)
Plot
Seven-year-old Griffin Davis is in bed as a wanted serial killer known as The Sandman who comes to “put people to sleep” breaks in and kills his parents. The Sandman is arrested outside by police. Seventeen years later, Griffin is working as a barista while trying to make it as a journalist. He reads in the news that The Sandman is finally to be executed. Just before the execution, The Sandman is visited by a preacher who leaves him with an unusual knife. After the execution, The Sandman transforms into a creature of sand. From there, he is able to enter the dreams of others. He begins killing the friends of Griffin and comes after him, determined to settle scores.
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was a hit that spawned a series of sequels and became one of the biggest horror franchises during the 1980s and 90s. Other filmmakers rushed to make copycat dream horror films and/or featuring boogeyman characters spouting one-liners. One of the offshoots of this fad was a series of films about killers come back from the electric chair or execution chamber. This was sparked off with the success of Elm Street director Wes Craven’s Shocker (1989) and saw a number of copies over the next few years with the likes of The Horror Show (1989) and The First Power (1990).
Sleepstalker is a fairly average VHS release circa 1995. It is by no means not poorly made and is competent delivered on most counts. It is also average and largely unmemorable. Certainly, The Sandman is an interesting variant on the Freddy Krueger-styled Boogeyman and director Turi Meyer devises some nifty effects with it appearing as a trickle of sand through various grilles and grates and then morphing into a human figure.
The exact nature of what The Sandman is is unclear. At the outset, he is just a run of the mill serial killer and indeed the character’s history is later connected to Jay Underwood’s past. In mid-film, we seem to be undergoing another executed killer back from the dead plot, but this is also unclear. This seems to be something involving The Preacher (Michael D. Roberts) who gives Michael Harris’s The Sandman a dagger that he scratches himself with while being taken off to the gas chamber. Somehow this gives the post-mortem Sandman the ability to invade people’s dreams a la Freddy Krueger and then to appear as a falling trickle of sand that turns into a person. We end up with a film where the powers of the nemesis are left vague and undelineated.
Amid the cast, Jay Underwood was an actor that had boyish charms who one always felt should have gone more places than he did. He appeared in a number of films between the mid-1980s and mid-2000s after which he apparently dropped out of acting to become a Baptist pastor. In the before-they-were-famous faces department is Kathryn Morris, later to become the lead in tv’s Cold Case (2003-10), as Underwood’s girlfriend. Amid the rest of the cast, Ken Foree from Dawn of the Dead (1978) turns for a single scene as a detective and Marc McClure, Jimmy Olsen to Christopher Reeve’s Superman, has a brief scene at the start as Griffin’s father.
Sleepstalker was a directorial debut for Turi Meyer who went on to male Candyman: Day of the Dead (1999) and Alien Express (2005). Meyer has also written other genre films such as Leprechaun 2 (1994), Galgameth (1996) and Wrong Turn 2: Dead End (2007) and served as a story editor and producer on tv’s Smallville (2001-11), The Vampire Diaries (2009-17), Witches of East End (2013-4), Salem (2014-7), Midnight, Texas (2017-18) and Stargirl (2020-2).
Trailer here
Full film available here