External
Occipital
Protuberance

Headlines

Entertainment

Nerd Alert!

Sports

OUR
so-called
SPORT

Brain Candy

Jeff's Head

John's Head

Rob's Head

Contact Us

The new Stephen King adaptation Dreamcatcher includes the following: Four men, best friends since childhood, who share a telepathic bond. A terrifying weekend in a remote snowy log cabin in Maine. Shapeshifting alien monsters invading Earth. Alien eels with razor sharp teeth that gestate inside humans and attack by biting the crotches of its victims. A character named Jonesy who gets run over by a car and then pops up in the next scene 'six months later' alive and no worse for wear. A retarded (the movie's word, not mine) boy/man who is also telepathic, also an alien, has leukemia and loves Scooby-Doo. Morgan Freeman. An alien leader named Mr. Gray who takes over the body of one of the characters and then inexplicably speaks with a British accent. A character named Beaver. A staggering amount of fart jokes.

Looking at that shopping list of plot points, the objective mind would conclude this stuff doesn't make sense. Two hours and sixteen minutes later, the hapless viewer would then discover that Dreamcatcher wholeheartedly agrees.

Dreamcatcher starts off with the four telepathic friends: There's Henry (Thomas Jane, the poor man's Christopher Lambert; and that is a poor man indeed), a psychiatrist who uses his telepathy to drive his patients insane (which makes me wonder how many actually pay their bills.). Then we meet aforementioned Jonesy (Damian Lewis, doing the exact polar opposite of the phenomenal work Nicolas Cage did playing two characters in Adaptation), a teacher who uses his telepathy to learn his students are cheating and then pass them anyway. Pete (Timothy Olyphant) is a used car salesman whose telepathy creeps out women before they can sleep with him, to his drunken dismay. And then there's Beaver (Jason Lee), the one with the glasses and the fatal toothpick fetish. I don't recall Beaver displaying his telepathy, but the other three assure us he has it too, so there we are.

When they were all in their patented Stephen King youth (in flashbacks so reminiscent of Stand By Me I could practically hear the Ben E. King song in the background) the four befriended a retarded boy named Duddits who shared with them his telepathic gifts. Together, they solved mysteries like the Scooby-Doo gang. As older men, the four trek to an annual gathering in a log cabin in Maine in the middle of winter to sit around and endlessly talk to each other in annoying bebop hipster jargon ("fuckaroo" "fuckaree" "Fuck me, Freddy!" "SSDD: Same Shit, Different Day.") Only on this day, the shit is totally different. The four run afoul of alien invaders straight from the X-Files, Pete and Beaver are killed by the groin-munching space eels, and Jonesy gets possessed by Mr. Gray and goes all "cheerio pip-pip bloody hell!" Then Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore show up as crack army alien hunters and Dreamcatcher ceases merely circling the toilet bowl and shoots straight down the crapper, taking the audience's hard-earned money with it, never to return.

Morgan Freeman has gone insane. Not just his character, but I fear the venerable actor himself has gone off the deep end for appearing in this mess. Freeman's Colonel Kurtz has been hunting aliens for 25 years and Sizemore's Captain Underhill is set to replace him. But not before Kurtz can wipe out this alien invasion by any means necessary. He doesn't, but he does settle for killing Underhill instead for tooting the horn to his superiors on the whole 'Kurtz is insane' thing.

Meanwhile, Jonesy takes refuge in his mind (depicted as a big warehouse) when the alien leader Mr. Gray takes over his body. The warehouse comes complete with a locked door the alien leader can't open and a window so that Jonesy can 'watch' events happening through the alien's eyes. I couldn't understand why Mr. Gray didn't just go outside of the warehouse and crash through the window.

It's up to Henry to team with Underhill, avoid the unbalanced Kurtz, and find his old retarded friend Duddits so they can save Jonesy and stop Mr. Gray's ingeniously diabolical scheme for world domination: drive to Boston and drop an alien worm in a reservoir. So for 25 years, these aliens have been crashing on Earth in the middle of nowhere and somehow have repeatedly failed to get one little alien crotch monster into a major water supply? Why didn't they just fly their spaceships over a reservoir then? Why fly to Maine, steal a car and drive? Why anything?

Henry and Underhill seek out the adult Duddits, who grew up to be an unrecognizable Donnie Wahlberg. Armed with his Scooby lunchbox and Scooby stuffed animal, the dying Duddits joins his friends and fulfills his destiny by morphing into a grotesque computer-generated special effect and stopping the similarly morphed Mr. Gray. I would be remiss if I didn't note that because Duddits is retarded, he has a speech impediment, which meant the actors would 'dudder' and call Mr. Gray 'Mr. Gay, Mr. Gay.' Dreamcatcher contains the following rich dialogue from Scooby-Doo's number one fan Duddits: "Tooby-dooby-doo. Dot tome dork do do dow." And did I mention the farting? There was a lot of it.

Dreamcatcher is stunningly awful. The fact that it was written by William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride) and Lawrence Kasdan (The Empire Strikes Back) with Kasdan directing is unfathomable. I don't know if Dreamcatcher is a fuckaroo or a fuckaree, but fuck me, Freddy, it's a piece of shit.

- John Orquiola (reviewed 03/03)