Screen_Blitz Bizarre and courageously gruesome, this film inspired by the Stephen King novel of the same name gives a rise to an idea that boasted potential, regardless of how questionable it gets with its exercise into outlandishness. Crippling the underlining potential of its concept is the schlocky execution by director Lawrence Kasdan who fails to provide enough satisfying thrills and narrative compulsion to compensate for all the silliness and its failure to juggle a multitude of ideas at once that dominates the overall picture. For a film with a promising start, Dreamcatcher is a grave disappointment sparking with entertaining value that can only possibly be found in the unintentional laughter perpetrated by its poor attempts at landing good scares and thrills in the midst of its stomach-churning gore. And that is not even including Kasden and co-writer William Goldman's struggle to come up with good dialogue for the characters. Set in Maine, typical for Stephen King adaptations, this film deals with a quad of childhood friends: Henry (played by Thomas Jane), Beaver (played by Jason Lee), Jonesy (played by Damien Lewis), and Pete (played by Timothy Olyphant). These four are reuniting for a camping trip in the woods. Upon rescuing a frostbitten man lost in the woods, the four men discover that this man is infected with an alien parasite that threatens to invade the town. As these men, with their telepathic abilities, band together to fight against this mysterious alien invasion, they must cross paths with their old mentally ill friend Duddits (played by Donnie Wahlberg) to help stop the mayhem. Meanwhile, Army Colonel Abraham Curtis (played by Morgan Freeman) and his accomplice Owen Underhill (played by Tom Sizemore) in placed in the fight to save their town from the invasion as well. A good science-fiction horror piece requires a compelling idea blended with solid, edge-of-your-seat scares and thrills to keep your pulse pounding, and this film unfortunately contains neither of these. The dominating flaw in this film is that its filled with too many ideas to shuffle and not enough thought on how to blend them into a firm, coherent plot. Serving as the pedestal of the story is four men spending their weekend drinking booze and hunting deer, while recounting on the good ole days before being interrupted by a man who has, ahem!, an alien bursts out of his rear-end while sitting on the toilet. This odd episode transpires into an inert alien invasion plot that at least could have worked as a disposable gorefest. But add the subplot of the men acquiring telepathic powers, demonstrated in flashbacks of them as children, and the film is tasked with a difficult feat to blend it with the plot revolving around their battle with a vicious alien scum. With the script failing to do so, the overarching result is a hot mess of story alternating between laughably inept and convoluted to the point where the story swiftly loses it track of how schlocky it gets. The cast, particularly the four main actors Damien Lewis, Jason Lee, Thomas Jane, and Timothy Olyphant, display performances that never ski past the line of.....acceptable. It's awfully difficult to take such a stellar cast seriously when they strewn into a script pitting them with slipshod dialogue and awkward one-liners. It appears as if Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore is the only ones landing solid performances, but it is only too bad that their characters are even less interesting than our already underwritten main characters. Dreamcatcher is not the Stephen King adaptation we deserve. It is inept, sloppy, and plunges below the grounds of quality adaptations to the works of one of the greatest writers working today. Hollywood has boasted plenty of adaptation of King's works that warrant high praise for soaking their viewers into entertainment craze, this is not one of them. And if you wondering if this falls into the category of "so bad its good", my best answer would be probably not.

sarabarham-1 I only watched it because I'd just read the book and wanted to see how the film told the story. Such a lot of the best bits of the story missing. and the ridiculous finale is not in the book at all. The acting is mostly incredibly clunky (read - lousy), even Damian. I think the only reason Mr Gray had the posh English accent is because Damian went to Eton, and could put it on. I could go on. But you've been warned.

adonis98-743-186503 Friends on a camping trip discover that the town they're vacationing in is being plagued in an unusual fashion by parasitic aliens from outer space. Dreamcatcher is a 2003 Horror movie starring Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, Thomas Jane, Tom Sizemore, Donnie Wahlberg and Morgan Freeman and like i said on my summary this film wasted a talented cast plus the cgi monster looked awful and the comedy made my eyes roll like an alien biting Olyphant's d*ck or even Wahlberg saying "Scooby-Doo" and other stupid scenes like that but the funny part is that the movie "Cell" that came out last year was more enjoyable than this which was also another failed attempt to translate a book to a movie from Stephen King. Overall "Dreamcatcher" could have been a great film but the bad choice of humor and the overall dull story took the whole premise away.

bkoganbing Dreamcatcher is the story of one nasty alien invasion that's spawning up in the north Maine woods where four friends Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, and Timothy Olyphant have an annual guys get together for a hunting trip. In fact these aliens have tried a few times before and there's an elite military unit headed by Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore that's charged with keeping these large space worms off the planet.Experience has taught Freeman not to do anything by halves. He hears a report they've landed somewhere and he eradicates everything for miles around. That includes humans and the four hunters are in his radius.But as it turns out way back when they were kids they saved a mentally retarded young man from bullies. That random act of kindness proves to be their salvation as the four are given the power of mental telepathy. And the retarded young man played by Donnie Wahlberg as a grown man also proves to be their's and the world's salvation. I guess among other things Stephen King was trying to say you never know when a random act of kindness might pay great dividends. I'm agreeing with another reviewer who says that Dreamcatcher succeeds as drama, horror and even comedy. Check out the scene where two of the guys are trying to contain a worm inside a toilet bowl.Fans of Stephen King should like this film as well as others like me.