Nine times out of ten, if you bring a Stephen King book to the big screen it’s going to be a disaster. Witness The Dark Half, Sleepwalkers, Nightflyer, Thinner, Needful Things and arguably four of five more movies and TV movies. The guy is an excellent author and yet, his work does not translate well and the latest of his books turned into movies, Dreamcatcher, attests painfully to that fact.
This movie is awful. Terrible. Horrible. Adjectives have not even been invented that describe the uninvented adjectives that can describe the white-hot baddness of this film.
It’s a long, lumbering, joyless beast that actually starts out decent and then goes straight to hell when you find out that the movie is about aliens. After that, it goes from okay to just plain ridiculous.
Dreamcatcher is about four friends united by a telepathic gift given to them by a mentally retarded child they they protected as kids. While on a getaway in an isolated cabin in Maine, they wind up in the middle of an alien invasion where aliens gestate inside your intestinal tract and then are unceremoniously crapped out by their hosts (no, I’m not kidding) giving the aliens the unflattering name, crap weasels.
But wait, there’s more.
Enter Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore playing a commander and second in command of an elite military branch brought in to contain the alien invasion. Now, when Freeman and Sizemore show up, it’s almost like we’re watching a complexly different movie and, if you can believe it, an even more boring movie.
How can the guy that brought us The Empire Strike Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark mess up a movie that started so decently?
This movie is awful. I cannot communicate how awful it is. It’s supposed to be scary, but it’s not. It’s supposed to be disturbing, but it’s just silly. It’s supposed to be tragic… and I guess it would be if you cared about any of the characters. It’s supposed to be gory… but the gore is so ridiculous that it’s comical. This is one supremely horrid movie.
Dreamcatcher is bad. It’s overlong, silly, stupid, and just indescribably bad. I mean, for goodness’ sake, a character dies in this movie because he had to have a toothpick in his mouth and he knows he’s going to die if he goes for the toothpick… and he goes for it anyway!
This is a schizophrenic movie. When it tries to be daring and original, it comes off as silly and ridiculous. When it tries to be philosophical, it comes off as terrible and stupid. When it tries to be scary, it comes off as unintentionally hilarious and gross.
I have no idea what the intentions were behind this movie, but once it goes off the rails, this steam-spewing mechanical beast plows through protected forests, endangered animal reserves, and orphanages — literally making the worst plotting decisions possible and turning all of the wrong directions. It becomes ridiculous and plows right into the center of Stupidville.
This movie is embarrassing. I honestly have no words.
Jason Gaston 