Stalked By My Doctor - A Sleepwalker’s Nightmare (2019) - very excited to watch this, to my knowledge the first official crossover of the lifetime channel intrusive thought extended universe. it’s a sequel not only to “sleepwalking in suburbia”, discussed above, but also to the “stalked by my doctor” series starring eric roberts. the first one of those was a comparatively staid thriller about the danger of a handsome doctor played by eric roberts saving your daughter’s life, fixating on her, and using various evil medical abilities to carry her away like baby mario. by the time it gets to stalked by my doctor 3 it’s basically turned into lifetime de palma - unannounced dream sequences, elaborate reversal schemes, faked deaths, sudden dance numbers, eric roberts talking to his subconscious as represented by another eric roberts in a hawaiian shirt, and his evil schemes have evolved to things like kidnapping two girls to transplant their hearts into one another so that both of them can love him. by the time this one begins he’s basically like a batman villain i guess, everyone seems to know his name if not recognize his face and he’s prone to dramatically whispering it into people’s ears whenever he stabs them. first victim is a passing therapist who he pours coffee on while having an erotic dream sequence in the middle of his busboy job. i really love the therapist’s needlessly long and involved harangue (“you incompetent fool!! you loser!! youre not even fit to wipe my table!! you must really be a failure to be a busboy at your age!!”) which is our first clue to the heightened emotional universe this movie operates in.
MEANWHILE - returning sleepwalking in suburbia heroine michelle gets up in the middle of the night and sleepwalks over to a nearby wedding, where she casts a pall on events by making out with the groom (bride response - “everything is RUINED!!”). but the groom is dressed like he’s in a 2010s indie folk band complete with dark dress shirt and suspenders so i think it’s probably for the best. anyway for this and other reasons she decides to check herself into the sleep clinic, where her new therapist turns out to be, well.
the plot for this one actually gets quite involved - in addition to the two leads there’s the heroine’s young niece who suffers from a different, even more exploitation-cinema-ready sleep disorder which is basically cartoon hypnosis where she has to do whatever anyone tells her while asleep…the suspicious medical coworkers… the niece’s boyfriend… a mysterious guy called Nicky Bismar who follows the doctor around while he’s committing crimes and is constantly holding an unlit cigar (are they allowed to smoke in these movies?)… it feels a bit sleazier than the usual antiseptic lifetime thing, like there’s a part where the heroine is framed for sleep murder and instantly tied to a bed at Greasy Dutch-Angle Mental Asylum where everything is covered in slime and the doctor comes in to taunt her about lobotomy via electroshock, and all i could think was “this was a bit more tasteful in that Stuart Gordon movie”. the orderlies are all giggling sex offenders who failed the ethics test to work at the place from Terminator 2. she escapes by bonking them with a nightstick while pretending to be sexomnia-ing out.
the good news is that some of the sleep therapy parts are pretty fun. there’s one where she explains her condition to the doctor while he tries to hide that he’s just reading the symptoms list from wikipedia. there’s another one where while asleep she gets up and faces the one way mirror in the sleep therapy room and starts doing the come-hither gesture and wiggling against the glass, but when he has to talk to a coworker and doesn’t make it in in time(?) she just shrugs and climbs back into bed. in general i liked the parts which seemed to suggest the sleepwalking side of her personality had a xenomoph-esque level of dangerous cunning and attack ability, including what seemed like a mysterious power to tell when her niece was being inappropriately taken out to dinner by an older man. my big complaint about the movie is that she was awake for the finale like a regular person - i hoped she really would be asleep when busting out and end up fighting him the same way. the climax is actually kind of muted and the most exciting thing that happens in it is that eric roberts does a word scramble and finds that the mysterious “Nicky Bismar” who haunts and follows him around is actually “My Sick Brain”, a different and more evil non-eric roberts persona who gives him the speech about how inside us there are two dogs.
in the end he gets hit in the head with a shovel as is franchise tradition, and the heroine and niece state “no more therapy” as he’s carted away to be electrocuted in dubious videogamey medical institution. but i think the final word on the movie should go to the minor-character murder detective who asks “so, uh… sexomnia. is that for real?”