Fair warning: I just downed a mug of spiked hot chocolate and a hash brownie, so I may slip off into random episodes of gibberish in this review. If anyone asks, make up something ironic, like I took some Ambien™ and because nobody strapped me to my bed I'm up Somnambu-reviewing or something. I'm sure I can squeeze a lawsuit out of that somehow, right?

Our movie opens with a young man throwing the same weak one-two combination on a punching bag in his basement. He then gets a phone call and we learn that this isn't just a pointless scene of a guy trying to avoid his homoerotic tendencies by punching something and trying to be macho, but it's actually setting up for a huge plot twist as he gets a call from someone on his cell phone and... the whole punching bag thing is used as a cheap lead in for a masturbation joke. I don't know if I've ever hated a movie within the first 70 seconds of watching it, so already it looks like The Somnambulists is looking to break records! No, no, I'll give it a fair shot to show me how bad it actually is before I condemn it, I promise. Anyway, Johnny Meatpump winds up with a new breathing slit in his windpipe shortly after, so with any luck that means we won't need to see any more scenes of lunkheads "beating their bags". Who was this short-lived lump and why was he killed? Personally I could give two shits, but it was my decision to review this thing, so I guess I'll be finding out, despite my best (and by that I mean worst) efforts.

From here we're introduced to Francesca and her grandpa, the latter of which was likely cast not for his talents, but because he was the oldest person the director knew... probably his actual grandfather... or just the guy who's putting the Viagra thermometer to his dear old granny. Anyway, Old Man Withers here is up late one night and finds lovely twenty-something Franny is having trouble sleeping, so instead of warm milk or a few shots of NyQuil and bourbon to send her on her way, he tells her an old legend that the dead don't go to Heaven or Hell, but actually live in our dreams, where they try to take control of our bodies and kill us... I'm guessing he's the type of grandparent that gets a lot of restraining orders placed against him. Continuing down the path of "old people shouldn't be allowed around other people", grandpa even makes the casual comment to his own granddaughter at the breakfast table that, "My pecker's still workin'"... I think my brain just violently threw up inside of my skull and it's starting to burn the back of my eyes... The movie's not all about sleep deprived hot chicks, creepy old men, and guys hitting inanimate objects though, because it looks as if there's a serial killer loose in, uhm, whatever their presumably unassuming sleepy little berg it is these people live in. Does it have anything to do with these evil Somnambulist ghosts that grandpa was talking about? Does Larry King live off the blood of African orphan babies he has smuggled in through black market connections? In case you weren't sure, the answer to both of those is "duh".

In one of those "irritating for some, kinda funny for other" moments, Fran's grandpa's last name is Loomis, and he goes out drinking with a friend of his named Don Pleasance. 10 years ago I would've thought that was kinda cool to wink at the horror movie fans out there like that, but after all the winks I'm subjected to watching these things over and over again, I'm more inclined to start gouging out these filmmakers' eyes just so I can escape all of their damn winking. It's not cute anymore kids, a hundred people had the idea long before you did, so just stop it, or I'll be slipping your optometrists a few extra bills to scorch the image of my ass into your retinas.

As bad as Fran's grandpa's acting is, he's Robert DeNiro in comparison to the guy playing her friend Brodie, who may or may not be legally retarded. Whatever the case, putting him on camera should get the director and the producers up on charges of harassment and abuse towards the audience. I've experienced "road rage" and it's nothing compared to the "Brodie rage" of having this half-wit shoved into my face for 12 second intervals! He's even more annoying than the movie's generic "I took 3 weeks of lessons to get this good!" piano music. Fran goes to bed and wakes up dead of heart failure though, so hopefully everyone associated with will make their exits from movie along with the one good thing it had going for it. Not only does the movie do us the indignity of killing off the one character I haven't hated so far, but it also throws salt in our wounds by telling us that she was raped and beaten by football players (who apparently left her clothed or at least re-dressed her afterwards…) after her high school prom several years ago... just another of the eighty or so reasons her grandpa shouldn't have been making references to his penis to her at the breakfast table. The cops also find Brodie dead in Fran's basement with his throat slit, so hooray for the movie! Unfortunately, the involvement of the police also brings another irritating character into the mix, this one being Detective Daniel Todd: the gruff black officer who can only speak in a bad Snake Plissken imitation, but with all the intensity of animated Prozac spokesdog Droopy. As such, I find it appropriate to say to this movie, "I don't like you".

After the cops find Brody in the basement, Grandpa Loomis decides he's not interested in talking to them anymore, so he says he's going to go visit his wife (who died in a car accident he caused, so hopefully this means he's going to kill himself) and closes the basement door... and then the credits roll!? What the fuck! The DVD box promised me this dung heap would drag on for another 55 minutes! Granted, this is a sort of blessing, considering how bad the movie was for the 20 minutes it was happening, but I paid for 75 minutes of material to riff on, not 20! Argh!

According to the timecode of the disc, there are indeed 75 minutes to this feature, but once you FF>> through the credits, you're subjected to an entirely uninteresting 10 minutes of behind-the-scenes fodder, followed by another 40 senses suffocating minutes of interviews with the cast (which is an appropriate name since these people should all be beaten to the point that they spend the next 6 months in casts) and other people forced to sit through not only the "movie" but also pointless music recitals by people I'm only assuming are responsible for the shite playing in the background of said "movie". Even these interview segments are done with all the professionalism of a junior high AV Club as people are filmed aimlessly shuffling around, doing nothing in general, while the interview segments are edited in no way to even resemble anything close to professional. When asked what their favorite part of the "movie" was, everyone just kind of stutters uncomfortably until they can remember the one or two brief moments they weren't preoccupied with digging something out of their ear. The fact that my wrists remain unslit right now are a testament to just how fucking hardcore I am... now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put on some mascara, curl up in my shower and cry like a rape victim for the next few hours while scalding hot water rains down on me. Good night kids, may your lives remain forever free of violation by The Somnambulists.