Is there a doctor in the audience? Stephen King needs medical attention.

No, he hasn't lopped off his head, lacerated a finger or scratched his chest open exposing his beating heart.

King needs help from the psychiatric persuasion.

The man has a serious problem with cemetery (or sematary) and gushing-blood fixations.

But now he has a problem putting quality on the screen.

Sleepwalkers is billed as "The first Stephen King story written expressly for the scream." Nice pun, but unfortunately the scream is more from swelling laughter than horror.

The film begins with a fair amount of rolling suspense as Mary and Charles Brady (Alice Krige and Brian Krause), a mother and son tandem, move into the small town of Travis, Ind.

They do what any other normal Stephen King family would do. Mom and son set steel traps to kill the neighborhood cats, have sex with each other and seek out a female virgin to kill by sucking out her spirit, life force, purple glow or whatever.

As if this plot line isn't weak and strange enough, the film goes ballistically stupid once Charles changes into a hairless Teen Wolf and attempts to suck the life from his virgin victim --in a cemetery, of course.

The hunger for the virgin purple life force metamorphizes Charles into an unscary monster figure and an unfunny comedian.

Following this ludicrous escapade, unbelievable dumbness dominates the rest of Sleepwalkers. Some examples of the decline of King's work include scenes featuring death-by-corncob, bitten-off fingers and eye sockets used as if they were holes in a bowling ball.

The parts written to be funny aren't, but the horror written to be scary is.

For those who can't believe King could write an awful screenplay, let Sleepwalkers be the proof in the plasma pudding.

The one bright spot of the film is Clovis, the deputy cat. Clovis is a mixture of Toonces and Hannibal Lecter. He spends most of his time in the car or eating the face of a Sleepwalker, like Charles.

Because of the film's worthlessness, promoters will need to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find nice things said about it.

I think Sleepwalkers very well may be "Best Comedy of the Year."

Wait for it on video, get a group of friends and let the howl of laughter coming from your house haunt the neighborhood.