Metacritic reviews

Stephen King's Sleepwalkers represents the first time the author has ever written a story directly for the screen. The result is a nicely paced picture that unfolds gradually, with shocks and surprises throughout. [11 Apr 1992, p. C3]

Garris, filming mainly in a bobbing and weaving, hand-held camera style, keeps the scenes pared down to their functional essentials, wisely substituting speed for nuance. Sleepwalkers gets the job done. [13 Apr 1992, p.5C]

While Sleepwalkers fails spectacularly as a horror movie, it triumphs as a loopy camp comedy. Sleepwalkers gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, which is saying something, as it starts out batshit insane.

Sleepwalkers, Steven King's first original screenplay, is horror filmmaking by numbers. It has monster fiends, a few swooshing tracking shots, many a touch lifted from every self-respecting vampire movie ever made, and several weak but intentional laughs to indicate that no one here is taking the thing too seriously.

Sleepwalkers is badly plotted and unimaginatively conceived, though not without a number of seat-squirming scenes.

From the creature FX to the stilted dialogue, Sleepwalkers offers nothing new for horror fans to sink their collective fangs into.

STEPHEN KING'S SLEEPWALKERS is an unusually stupid and tedious film that seems aimed at viewers who have never seen a horror movie and will therefore be shocked and surprised by the idea that such apparently nice people as Mary and Charles Brady could be murderous, shape-shifting energy vampires.

Besides displaying a tin ear for dialogue, King stoops to such conventions as having the sleepwalkers vulnerable to just one thing - cat scratches. [13 Apr 1992, p.6D]

You expect more from King. The man obviously knows a thing or two about terror, yet Sleepwalkers is a pastiche of old B- movies. Bad B-movies. [16 Apr 1992, p.F3]

Morbid, silly and ultra-violent, Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is pure trash from the popular horrormeister. It is so bad that surely the only way that it could have been made was to have King's name on it.