...bogs down in psychological mumbo-jumbo, redundancy, imitation, and sheer vulgarity, with a multitude of flashbacks interrupting the flow of what little narrative is left.
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As everybody knows, Stephen King writes about 800 books a year, and they all end up as movies ten minutes after they hit the stores. But how many of these movies are any good? Count them on the fingers of one hand. But don't count "Dreamcatcher."
Maybe there's just so much you can do with a space-alien flick, and "Dreamcatcher" adds nothing new. This 2003 nonstarter is made all the worse for our knowing that it not only came originally from the pen of America's most popular and prolific horror-story writer but that it was directed by one of Hollywood's premier filmmakers, Lawrence Kasdan ("Body Heat," "The Big Chill," "Silverado," "Grand Canyon," "The Accidental Tourist"), and the script co-written by one of the screen's best writers, William Goldman ("Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Stepford Wives," "All the President's Men," "Marathon Man," "The Princess Bride," "Misery"). Seems a waste of talent, you know?
The movie has more people in it and more dangling subplots than you can throw a flying saucer at. King's novels are always too long, anyhow, and at 134 minutes, so is this film. It goes off on any number of tangents and gets lost along the way. Besides which it substitutes shock and coarseness for genuine frights, a definite horror-movie no-no.
After some appropriately creepy opening graphics and some equally atmospheric opening music by James Newton Howard, the first half hour of the film is taken up with character exposition before any real action ever begins; yet it's this part of the picture that is most pleasing. Maybe that's because character development and relationships are what Kasdan does best. When the monsters and hobgoblins show up, the movie slides relentlessly downhill.
We start with four, adult, male best friends, Henry (Thomas Jane), Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Beaver (Jason Lee), and Pete (Timothy Olyphant), who in their childhood were given the power to communicate with one another telepathically. In a flashback from years earlier we see them saving a mentally challenged little boy, Duddits, from some bullies, and in repayment Duddits providing the fellows with premonitory gifts to see into each other's lives. It's like that in Mr. King's romanticized world, where people who are mentally wanting have other, special, often supernatural endowments. Then again, Duddits is more than he appears.
Flash forward back to the present, where our four heroes go on a winter retreat to the backwoods of Maine (it's always Maine in King's stories; he lives there, so what are you going to do), to a cabin where they've gone every year for twenty years. It's there that all hell breaks loose. But we're a good forty-five minutes into the story before it does.
So what we've got so far is an interesting character study that seems to be going nowhere until the whole thing turns into a space invasion of the grossest kind. And I mean gross. The four split up for a moment, two staying in the cabin and two going in the car, and the two of them who stay behind find a stranger wandering out in the snow, lost. They take him in and notice he's suffering from continual belching and flatulence. Then the stranger goes into the bathroom, where he chunks out a space weasel from his bottom end. Almost simultaneously, everyone's cell phones go dead, and the two fellows that left the cabin crash their car and have to return on foot in the snow. When they get back to the cabin, the space alien, a giant slug-like creature with rows of pointy teeth, has done its thing.
How can anyone of any age take any of this seriously?
But wait, that's not all. Morgan Freeman, one of my favorite actors, shows up at this point sporting flyaway eyebrows (for reasons unknown) and playing a looney army colonel, Abraham Curtis, who's been fighting these alien monsters for twenty-five years and finally gone around the bend. Freeman is the first-billed actor in the movie, but his role is so small he's actually nothing more than a supporting player. Still, he's got the big name, so he gets the top billing. His character is the head of an elite military group that cleans up alien infestations before the public gets wind (pun intended) of them, and he wants not only to kill the creatures themselves but any humans they've contacted. His second-in-command flunky, Owen, is played by Tom Sizemore, an actor who gets as much or more screen time as Freeman but is listed lower in the credits. Such are the vicissitudes of life in the movie business.
Anyway, you've guessed that the aliens use human bodies as receptacles for their nefarious plans, whatever those plans are. They take over human bodies, and when they need to do so escape through the rectum. I say "whatever those plans are," incidentally, because it is never made clear what these beings want, except the usual pursuit of world domination. Trouble is, the aliens in our present story have accidentally crash-landed in their spaceship, and they probably just want to go home. Like most everything else about this picture, we never find out what's going on with them; or how, if they're so powerful and advanced, Earth has been able to ward them off so easily for the past twenty-five years without anybody outside the government catching on. We just know they're mean critters.
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[release]11045[/release]