Dreamcatcher (2003)

Wow...what a big fucking mess of a movie! Even after watching it I’m still not sure what the hell it was about, so ah, maybe someone out there can fill me in. Here’s what I gathered from it, and trust me, it ain’t much. A group of friends, now in their thirties, share an unusual bond. As kids they rescued a local retarded boy from being beat up by a gang of asshole jocks. Soon after, the retarded fellow becomes part of the boy’s tight knit friendship and as a reward; the dude bestows all of them with a certain amount of psychic ability as he himself is likewise gifted. Now the boys can hear each other’s thoughts etc, you know, the usual psychic stuff. Now, if you think about it, that would sort of suck to have at age 14, because imagine sitting over at your buddies house watching TV, and god help you if your thinking how much you would love to bang your friends mom. Anyway, now in there thirties, the same friends get together once a year in a cabin up in the mountains to drink beer and relive the old days. Once at the cabin several of the guys stumble across a couple lost in the woods, both of whom have some weird red shit on their face along with the worst case of gas known to man. Now, here is where everything gets turned around. Just when you think you got a supernatural type flick on your hands, what with all the psychic stuff, the movie does a 180-degree twist on your uncomprehending ass. Apparently there is also an alien invasion underway on earth and these gassy bastards are infected with a sort of leech thing inside their bodies, as is the entire wildlife and surrounding towns in a certain radius. Before you know it we get Morgan Freeman and his inhumanly large eyebrows as an alien killing government type who’s quarantined the entire area, including the boys in their cabin, who now realize the people they rescued aren’t exactly what they seem. From here on out what I thought was going to be a typical rip off of “The Thing”, turns into some type of weird sci-fi flick, complete with a helicopter alien attack scene that came out of nowhere, an alien with a British accent (what the fuck?), plus more psychic/alien hoopla than you would care to believe. And after about 60 minutes of this nonsense, I didn’t care one bit. “Dreamcatcher” is so muddled, it’s really amazing the number of ideas they tried to cram into this film, with none of them really working at all. It’s also loaded with tons of crappy CGI effects that, well, look like crap. If you’ve read the novel and are interested in seeing what justice the film did to the book, then view at your risk. Piss on it.