THE SLEEPING CAR
See a guy killed by bedsprings!

  I don't think I've ever seen a horror movie with dialogue that so persistently tries to be funny.  Not that it all succeeds - not that much of it succeeds, for that matter - but damn, you can't watch for fifteen seconds without having two or three gags tossed at you by one character or another.  The humor isn't physical, it's all verbal, which is rare in this kind of film, and just how much of it flops dead suggests why you don't see it more often.

David Naughton - you'll remember him from An American Werewolf In London - stars as a college student who moves into a train car that's been converted into a duplex.  He's not too bright - it takes him about half the film to determine that the movie's heroine is all over him like ugly on an ape.  Anyway, this "suite" comes with rules - rules laid down by The Mister before his untimely death.  The Mister was the guy in charge of the train car back when it was still mobile.  Well, when the "no hanky, and especially no panky" rule is violated, you can figure out where things are going.

At least half of the action taking place at the campus bar, this movie came out in 1990, but looks and feels about ten years older, so that a Dan Quayle joke near the beginning feels way out of place.  Some of the jokes don't even make sense.  ("Damn, why couldn't I have been invaded by the ghost of, like, Hugh Hefner?"  Nobody bothers to suggest that perhaps it's because Hef's still alive.)

It could've been a lot worse, but the nonstop silliness - and the feeling that those involved thought they were being a lot funnier than they ultimately turned out to be - is off-putting.  Directed by Douglas Curtis, who did the similarly over-jokey The Campus Corpse.

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