Four friends return to the Hole in the Wall, a Maine hunting redoubt where they have met yearly for 20 years. There's brainy shrink Jonesy (Damian Lewis), working stiff Beaver (Jason Lee), depressive mope Henry (Thomas Jane), and budding alcoholic Pete (Timothy Olyphant). Each man has his own psychic and emotional baggage, but the thread that holds them together is the act, when they were all children, of rescuing mentally challenged boy Duddits from older bullies. In return for their kindnesses, they were all mysteriously bestowed with the gift of clairvoyance and the ability to cause ripples in reality. A fun weekend of beer drinking, hunting, and male bonding comes to an abrupt end, though, when a stranger clad in hunting gear shows up on their doorstep. The stranger is having some serious gastric problems (and noxious blasts of gas as well) that come to an end in the bathroom when a toothy lamprey-type critter as big around as a man's arm crawls out of his backside. Jonesy and Beaver discover the nasty beastie and its dead host (as well as a red fungus that encroaches on everything), only to have the US Army announce that the entire area is under quarantine.
The Army's Blue Team of hardcore alien hunters is led by the lunatic Col. Curtiss (Morgan Freeman, sporting some wooly eyebrow prosthetics) and his right-hand man, stolid Owen (Tom Sizemore). The Blues have cordoned off several square miles of territory and send in combat helicopters to do battle with the crashed alien ship, while Curtiss' idea of eradicating the threat is to kill everyone ("Those poor schmucks... they drive Chevrolets, shop at Wal-Mart, never miss an episode of Friends. These are Americans. The idea of slaughtering Americans... well, it just turns my stomach."). Caught between the designs of the berserk colonel and the voracious aliens, it's up to the four friends to try and save the world. Meanwhile, one alien has taken over Jonesy's mind, but a near-death experience years back somehow made him resistant to the invader. The schism splits him into Jonesy and Mr. Gray, with the alien's persona being that of a jovial Brit twit bent on getting to Boston's water supply so he can release an alien worm ("sh*t-weasel") that's been incubating inside a German shepherd. It finally comes down to calling on the adult Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg), now terminal with leukemia, when it's time for the showdown with the unpleasant aliens.
Dreamcatcher didn't do especially well in the theaters, and received a sound drubbing from the critics, but it's still worth watching. Adapting Stephen King's sprawling 800-page epic to the screen, with all its themes, subplots, and subtexts is a daunting task for any director, but Lawrence Kasdan does his best. It's worth noting that screenwriter William Goldman was also behind the King adaptations Hearts in Atlantis and Misery. After all, there are buddy-movie elements, sci-fi threads, and alien-possession details (not to mention a whole other plot involving the conflicts within the military unit), all of which are recurring King themes. There are, admittedly, enough loose ends to make a macrame' plant hanger (or maybe a Dreamcatcher), but the characters are what really hold the movie together. Well-fleshed-out and believable, the foursome hold the line as best they can against something they can't comprehend. And, of course, there's a fair amount of grisly guts-n-gore to satisfy the horror fans in the audience.
There aren't a whole lot of special features to go around on this disc, but the ones that are included are worth the time. There's an insightful interview with King himself, in which he observes that the scene early on where Jonesy is hit by a car is his first indirect reference to his own near-fatal 1999 incident. He also notes that having the men first encounter the alien in the cabin's bathroom is rather novel, as the bathroom's privacy has always been sacrosanct in people's minds (and it's also the place where people discover things like tumors on their own bodies). There's also an interview with Kasdan, a behind-the-scenes documentary, a look at the movie's visual effects (some of which are surprisingly old-fashioned), four deleted scenes, and the movie's (inferior) original ending. Don't go searching for a director commentary, since there isn't one.
The track record for adapting King novels to the silver screen has been checkered at best, what with '80s stinkers like Firestarter and the dreadful Maximum Overdrive. Still, there are a couple that are definitely worth watching. 1986's Stand By Me, though short on action and horror, is a great character study of kids bonding by shared experiences. David Cronenberg's 1983 The Dead Zone turns loose Christopher Walken on a tale of clairvoyance and, ultimately, political assassination. Going back a few more years is DePalma's Carrie (1976), a still-shocking tale of telekinesis and high-school revenge; Carrie set the bar pretty high for all King adaptations to follow.
Some will enjoy Dreamcatcher, while others will be tempted to poke holes in the story (which is certainly easy enough to do). To be sure, there are unintended laughs to be had, such as when Henry is talking to Jonesy by using a .45 pistol as a psychic telephone, or Jonesy's hotdog split-personality performance, or the gross-out aspect of slimy alien eels spewing out of people's butts. In all fairness, though, the movie's shortcomings spring from the messy, overambitious nature of the source material, which recycles several of Stephen King's ideas from over the years. All that having been said, it's still worth watching, and not just for King completists.
— JERRY RENSHAW
Four friends return to the Hole in the Wall, a Maine hunting redoubt where they have met yearly for 20 years. There's brainy shrink Jonesy (