Review of Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal (2012) by Aaron A — 18 Aug 2012

"you can't wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club".

Synopsis: Synopsis: a struggling painter, Lars, accepts a job teaching art at a rustic art school. Here he meets Eddie, a man who eats animals in his sleep, and is inspired by his horrible actions.

I've always been annoyed with those individuals that think of a zombie only as an undead and shambling rotten corpse, as if these creatures were legitimate bio-forms with strict classification and not just make believe. These same individuals refuse to call the villains in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and video-game classic Resident Evil 4 zombies, just because they are infected and not undead. Perhaps as a result of the popularity of this image as well as fans' insatiable appetite for brain damage, store shelves are crammed full of typical (albeit high quality) depictions and uninspired renditions of zombi.

And then we have Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal, a zombie movie that dares to be different and makes a new type of statement about the good ole Zombie movie. Our friendly neighborhood zombi this time around is Eddie. He's not dead, not infected and has no preference for brains, yet to call him anything other than a Zombie once he starts sleepwalking would be foolish; he has no control over his actions nor any memory of them the next morning (you know the feeling), and for some reason likes to eat people half naked. But Eddie isn't the really interesting aspect of this zombie feature, it's thematic development is what I find refreshing.

Instead of the typical struggle to survive the oncoming zombie horde and all the philosophical ramblings that go with them. "Eddie" instead faces a subject few zombie movies (if any) have the time to deal with, the pressures of being an artist. Through our inspiration starved hero Lars, we get a tongue-in-cheek window into the crazy things an artist may do to find inspiration and ease the pressures from sponsors to create revenue.

The problem is that the film is pretty much only as deep as it's concept. It's very humorous and says something interesting, but the profundity of Lars' action are rarely expressed. With a more talented director behind the lens, like The Coen Broths (a major influence of this picture), a way to add more significance to the proceedings could have been found, instead of just playing it like a joke.

But as a tongue-in-cheek joke about artists like Daniel Day Lewis morphing into their roles with total commitment or Heath Ledger locking himself in a hotel room alone for a month to capture the mindset of his Batman character "The Joker", it's pretty great.