Saturday, April 24, 2010

Eye Candy #290 - "Dreamcatcher"

Dreamcatcher:  It should come as no surprise that one of Stephen King’s most lackluster books became a lackluster movie.  A story that seems like a mish-mash between “The Tommyknockers” and “Stand by Me/The Body” (both of which are better stories by the way), about four men who have all been friends since childhood, have mental powers, and find themselves in the middle of an impromptu alien invasion in the woods outside Derry, Maine.  And the aliens aren’t curious little gray men, but rather gory, lamprey-like monsters that hibernate in humans before exiting out whichever orifice is convenient (“they put creatures..in our boodies!”) and the only person that can save them is the retarded boy-now-man that the four men befriended when they were younger.  There is a major personality conflict here as the film can’t decide if it wants to be a nostalgia pic, a gory horror film, an alien invasion flick, a big bad government conspiracy rant, so in lieu of doing any of those in particular, it ends up doing none of them well.  The script is chock full of dialogue that is notable only in the sense that it’s NOT like people talk.  The cast tries hard and has a good pedigree - Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Morgan Freeman, Timothy Olyphant, Tom Sizemore, and Damian Lewis, but they are hamstrung by the script (and Morgan Freeman has Mentat-like eyebrows for no explicable reason whatsoever).  I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, and it’s exactly what I got.   Stephen King reportedly sold the rights to this book for $1.  Well, he got his money’s worth.  Lawrence Kasdan hasn’t directed a good movie since 1985’s “Silverado”.  Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”

No comments:

Post a Comment