Dreamcatcher - The Filthy Critic

This week:
Dreamcatcher

Filthy says:
"What the Fuck?"

I like scary movies. I like to get the willies, to get the chill up your spine that's otherwise only available by peeing in a crowded public restroom. But what the fuck?

What the fuck is this piece of shit? I don't mean this question in a "Whoa, heavy, dude," kind of way. I mean it in a "Who just crapped in the foyer?" kind of way.

A movie can be awful because it's inept, pretentious, unfunny, stilted, hackneyed or a dozen other reasons. But very few movies are awful simply because they're incomprehensible. Dreamcatcher is. Who in his right fucking mind read this script and said, "Makes sense to me"? Is there anyone at Warner Brothers with the balls to say, "This makes absolutely no sense"? This movie has one thing going for it: whiny asshole Jason Lee is killed early on.

What a God damn turd. Dreamcatcher is a waste of a lot of competence. it looks fine, has about three spooky things in the firsthalf hour, and then it falls apart like an incestuous drunk at his daughter's wedding. You or I couldn't come up with a more unfocused, silly, annoying, tiresome, overlong movie if we gave a pack of Ritalin-jonesing third graders avideo camera.

Dreamcatcher is based on a Stephen King novel. It should be an eight-hour miniseries on the Sci-Fi Channel, not the two-plus hour testicle-crushing experience I wanted to sleep through. there's certainly enough plot for a mniseries. The movie begins as four lifelong friends doing some male-bonding out in the woods when a snowstorm rolls in. They take in a stranded hunter who, hilariously enough, farts a lot.

After the movie has exhausted all the fart jokes it can think up, it reveals that the mysterious hunter is inhabited by a killer alien. The monster is similar to an eel except it has a mouth like a vagina full of razor-sharp teeth. That sort of trim has got to be my number one fear in life. After a little bloodletting, the movie veers way off the course of remote-cabin horror movies. that's a fucking shame because while it wasn't anything new, at least it made sense.

The army is involved. Apparently head honcho Morgan Freeman has been tracking these creatures for 25 years. The movie never explains why they've apparently never made any progress. Neither does it explain how, in 25 years, the aliens still haven't taken over the earth. It looks pretty damn easy to do. The aliens are led by a giant creature named Mr. Gray. It wants to kill everyone, but despite being able to respond to a human moniker, it has no capacity to explain its motives. It just wants earth, okay?

Oh yeah, Freeman's character is or isn't crazy. There is an internal struggle between him and his superiors that takes place almost entirely off-screen and results in a ridiculous, violent finale where he attacks a subordinate who is fighting the aliens. Did I mention the giant spaceship that the army assaults?

The four friends are telepathic. They can read each other's minds and each has a special skill. They received the skills from a supernatural retard they befriended as kids. Oh, shit, don't let me forget to say that part of the movie takes place inside one character's head (which looks like a dusty warehouse), and he watches the story's action through a "window" while Mr. Gray inhabits his body. Oh, wait, wait, wait. One more thing: the retard is the only one who can save the world so the army and one friend have to go wake him up in the middle of the night. He's dying of leukemia and looks like Dana Carvey living in Sudan with an angry makeup artist. Naturally, he turns into a monster who battles Mr. Gray. Isn't that what you'd do?

I shit you not. Maybe in the novel all this makes sense; I don't care. (Note to Stephen King fans: my saying I don't care means I really don't, so don't write.) Dreamcatcher is like riding the bus next to a talkative autistic boy; what he's saying makes sense to him, but there's no way in hell you can follow along. And you can't even trick the movie into giving you the lunch its mom packed.I imagine much of the acton is metaphorical in the book. On screen, however, there is no underlying significance applied to anything.

With this movie you get several bad ones. Tired old remote-cabin horror movie, half-baked military thriller, shitty Independence Day type alien blockbuster, bad Invasion of the Bodysnatchers ripoff, and a cheesy take on the boyhood friendship movie Stand by Me. It's sort of like getting the USA Channel.

The evil Mr. Gray inhabits one character. To show us that he is inhabited, the character speaks in a haughty, snarling English accent when he's Mr. Gray. Then back to normal when he's himself. The result is many, long expository monologues. It's fucking preposterous. As I already described, this same character watches part of the story from inside his head. He shakes his fists and yells "Noooooo!" as the evil Mr. Gray controls his body.

Mr. Gray is a disgusting, slimy killer modeled on the one in Alien. When did he find the time to choose a name? Only the retard calls him Mr. Gray. How does the alien know this is his name, and when did he tell the retard?

In dreamy, nostalgic flashbacks the four friends are fucking pussies. The scenes are unbearably phony: it's how sentimental sixty-year-old men with head injuries remember their childhoods. In them, the twelve-year olds cry and rush to the aid of cripples. The kids have nothing to do but fret over some lost girl they hardly know and talk like they're already nostalgic for the youths they're living.

Throughout the movie, the four have this dreary, overwritten private lexicon of phrases like "Fuck me, Freddy!" and "Same Shit, Different Day" that get repeated over and over. It's supposed to give us a sense of this history they have together. Instead, it's a forced, tiresome thread of cheesy dialog that feels as insincere as the praise they'll lavish on this movie on the talk-show circuit. What's amazing is that writers Lawrence Kasdan (also director) and William Goldman thought this crap was clever.

By the time the retard transforms into a monster, there is almost no way to know which story to care about or why.One Finger for Dreamcatcher. What the fuck?

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