The Somnambulists (2005) — Triskaidekafiles

THE SOMNAMBULISTS

WRITER: Kevin Lane

DIRECTOR: Kevin Lane

STARRING: Tara Goudreau as Francesca Loomis

Jack Redman as Grandpa Loomis

Jordan Monaghan as Brody

Christine Murray as Detective Lee Bracket

Calvin Green as Detective Daniel Todd

QUICK CUT: A woman struggles to deal with her past while her grandfather has trouble sleeping

THE MORGUE

Francesca - A woman who is having trouble sleeping, and is haunted by visions of dead men. Which might explain the sleeping issues. She’s quiet, but always there for her friends.

Grandpa - Francesca’s grandfather, obvs, and he too has sleeping issues. This family might wanna see a doctor about that. He’s your average kindly grandfather, with a bit of a salty tongue.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! You are gonna notice this is a VERY short review this week. The movie is another from my recent purchases of those Pendulum 50 packs. I asked, as I've done the other times, my Amazon Echo to pick a random number between one and 50. I took the number, counted down the stack, and picked that movie. This movie, The Somnambulist.

The sleeve says the movie is 75 minutes or so long, but when I popped in the disc, well...it's only 25. It's my understanding the larger runtime is from an earlier single release of the short, that had another 50 minutes of behind the scenes content.

Well, I'm not one to argue with fate, and knowing a movie I have coming up is uh...let's just say LONG, I decided, fine. I will give myself a break, and do a really short film. As a treat. I think I'm allowed after almost 500 reviews.

I've been asleep for 70 years I think I've had enough rest.

The movie starts on a character going at a punching bag, when his phone rings, and he's reminded of a fancy dinner date later that evening.

Unfortunately, he will not be making it to dinner, as while he is getting ready, he suddenly grabs his throat as it is mysteriously sliced open, and he falls to the ground.

After the credits roll, we find ourselves with the woman who will be our main character, standing alone in the streets. Francesca hears a repeatedly whispered "I'm sorry" coming from the shadows.

The shadows better be sorry. They know what they did.

That's me in the spot light, losing my religion.

She suddenly wakes up and IT WAS ALL A DREAM. Ohhh no, not again.

Frankie heads downstairs, and finds her grandfather is still awake, enjoying his pipe by the fire. We learn this is not her first bad dream lately, and they're getting worse.

Wow. If what we saw is "worse" where did the bad dreams start? Puppies and rainbows?

She gets up to head back to bed, and gramps says that's where the dreams of the dead go to, and calls them our titular Somnambulists, Sleepwalkers, legends and folklore about how when we die, we don't go to heaven or hell, but just live on as dreams.

Then he gives the dire warning, "and sometimes they can get you."

Time to lay off the pipeweed there, grandpa.

We also learn that gramps has not been to sleep since his wife died. In a car wreck. While he was driving. So, he has stayed awake ever since, knowing she might be waiting for revenge in his dreams.

This is also a lie, no one could stay up for 10 years straight or however long it’s been.

After getting some sleep, Frankie gets back up and goes around town, and she just kinda wanders around until she bumps into her friend, Brody.

Okay, I need you to remember the rules for horror movies...

That encounter was completely uneventful though, and we cut to later that night when Frankie tries to catch up on some sleep.

She wanders around the house aimlessly, and for a movie this short...look, I get it's going for atmosphere, and actually doing a decent job of it, but this is SO short, you want it to do something.

Eventually she decides to go for another aimless walk outside, and someone lurks around behind her.

She turns, feeling she's being watched, but the person shuffles out of the way. She thinks it's Brody, for some reason, then shrugs and gets on with her walk.

Frankie sees the person outside, and hurries to catch up with them, still assuming it's Brody. And it is a nice change of pace to have any sense of urgency in this movie.

She rounds a corner and finds herself surrounded by a group of young men, clearly dead, each one with their throats slashed.

They repeat the earlier litany of "I'm sorry" and then tell her it wasn't them.

The Crow reboot just keeps looking worse and worse.

Meanwhile, gramps returns home, looking for Frankie, and she's not answering. We suddenly cut to her dead body, stuck in a frozen scream, as a medical examiner does his thing.

They declare the death a "heart failure" and everyone repeats it in disbelief, to really drive the point home about how young she was, and being “scared to death”.

I actually like this scene. Having a bunch of characters reacting to something, some of them clearly having seen it before, the deadpan humour, the sense of "oh no not again", it all works really well. The movie needed more of this. And having a bunch of characters actually conversing is nice. It’s got a nice, snappy pace to it, too.

The detectives head back downstairs to ask Gramps some questions, and that's when it all comes out.

After her homecoming dance, a group of boys attacked Francesca, and you can pretty much assume the worst here, and you'd be right.

It turns out this attack was too much for Francesca, and she would occasionally kill boys of the approximate age that reminded her of her attackers. She didn't know they were not her attackers, she was just stuck in a loop of constantly seeking revenge.

Gramps relates all this, and then says he's very tired, and he's going to go upstairs and see his wife. Implying with nothing else to live for, he is going to meet his fate, and receive his justice, at his wife's hands in his dreams, ending the movie.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: On par with the rest of the movies in these 50 packs. Tolerable, but not great.

Audio: Aggressively average.

Sound Bite: “I'm still as good as I ever was! My pecker still workin'!” Ohhh, grandpa!

Body Count: Well, for a story that’s only 24 minutes long? Three ain’t bad. Mix in a few dream corpses…could be worse, right?

1 - Two minutes in, and Sam Carpenter gets his throat slit.

2 - Francesca dies of 'heart failure'

3 - Another body is found in the basement

Best Corpse: None of them are terribly notable, but Sam we at least get to see killed, and the blood’s not bad.

Blood Type - D+: There’s almost no blood, but the one gag we see is done well enough, and bleeds appropriately. The dream dead are nicely done though.

Drink Up! Every time Francesca puts on her coat

Movie Review: It’s hard to really judge this. The story is very light, and what is there doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s too short for the lore it wants to establish. There’s some interesting ideas here, and it’s well made. The acting is solid. But like I said, with so much of it being one character, two at most, for most of it, there’s not much going on. It really is when the cops are going over Francesca’s body that things really take off. I could look at that scene and go, “Ah yes, there is talent here”. That said, yes, it does have somce nice atmosphere, and the slow pacing at least works well with a dreamlike quality to the story. There’s something here, but it is the rare instance when a short just ain’t cutting it. This needs more polish and tightening to pull off a 25 minute length sucessfully, or give it more space to breathe and expand. It would make a solid 45 minute story in some anthology series, if there wasn’t enough there to expand to a full length runtime. Three out of five pipes

Entertainment Value: It’s also too short to REALLY have fun with. And again, it’s that cop scene. That’s fun. That’s the star of the show. It also leads into a great performance by the grandfather which rides the line between moving and camp, as any breakdown would come off. Two out of five slashed necks.