On the DVD special features for Lawrence Kasdan’s 2003 psychic sci-fi hodgepodge “Dreamcatcher,” author Stephen King talks a little bit about how he came to write the 2001 novel on which it was based. He said that he had recently been severely injured in a car accident, and later admitted that he was under the influence of Oxycontin while writing the novel. King also noted that “Dreamcatcher” was supposed to be — at least in part — about exploring taboos. King felt that all sexual taboos had been covered by literature, stating that the bedroom door had already been opened. The bathroom door, though, he felt was still closed. The bathroom is where one explored their most personal and disgusting habits, King said, and it was high time he explored that.
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As such, there’s a scene in “Dreamcatcher” (both the novel and the movie) wherein a character named Beav (Jason Lee) is sitting on a toilet, unable to rise. There is a murderous extraterrestrial eel trapped inside the toilet, you see, one that just ejected itself from the posterior of a now-dead visitor. Beav needs to nervously chew on toothpicks to cope with the eel situation, but cannot reach where they have spilled on the floor nearby. He’s nervous and unable to get up from the toilet. That, it seems, was King’s centerpiece for “Dreamcatcher.”
King, however, did way, way, waaaaay more with his story, producing one of his oddest and worst works to date. It’s curious that a talented director like Kasdan and a talented screenwriter like William Goldman teamed up to adapt King’s worst book into what is one of his worst movies. It was even covered by the bad-movie podcast “How Did This Get Made?” We’ll get into the details below, but we need to pause to note that Morgan Freeman, who starred in the celebrated Stephen King adaptation “The Shawshank Redemption” in 1994, returned to Kingland for “Dreamcatcher.” I guess they can’t all be winners.
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Dreamcatcher is easily one of Stephen King’s worst movies
Freeman plays Colonel Abraham Curtis, a bitter, violent general in charge of a secret cabal of government agents tasked with seeking out and destroying any alien life forms with the temerity to invade Earth. He resents invaders, and loves to cuss. The recent spate of invaders he has nicknamed “s***weasels,” because of their unique form of reproduction. To wit: When an unwitting Earthbound life form eats the aliens’ eggs, they hatch inside their hosts’ bodies. The eel-like aliens are then pooped out of their host, killing them. There is a scene in which Curtis and his right-hand man, Lieutenant Underhill (Tom Sizemore), lead an air attack on the crashed alien vessel, located in the snowy woods of Maine. The aliens are psychic, by the way, so they psychically plea for their lives in English as the planes approach. Curtis and Underhill ignore the pleas and let the missiles fly.
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But this is all just a subplot to the central part of the movie. The main characters of “Dreamcatcher” are four lifelong friends named Jonesy, Beaver, Pete, and Henry (Damian Lewis, Jason Lee, Timothy Olyphant, and Thomas Jane, respectively). Every year, they take a hunting trip to a cabin in the Maine woods, all in tribute to an off-screen friend they called Duddits. The four main characters all share a vague psychic link and can read other people’s minds.
Flashbacks to the quartet’s childhoods reveal that Duddits gave them their psychic powers after they rescued him from a bully. Duddits is mentally disabled, but clearly possesses eerie abilities. Since the bully incident, the four friends have been inseparable, enjoying their masculine hunting trips annually. It’s into this milieu that the aliens invade.
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The weirdness of Dreamcatcher knows no bounds
But wait. There’s more. Because the aliens are also psychic, they seem well-matched to the four psychic friends they land next to. Jonesy becomes bodily possessed by an alien leader of some kind, and he spends the movie trying to rid the alien from his mind. This is envisioned in psychic action sequences wherein Jonesy and the alien chase each other around the hallways of a metaphorical library inside the man’s head. Out in the real world, the alien has inexplicably given Jonesy a British accent (even saying things like “guv’nah”). It’s strange that Jonesy’s British accent is so terrible, as actor Damian Lewis is British.
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The s***weasels aim to take over the world, and trek to a reservoir to implant the drinking water supply with alien eggs. This leads to a confrontation between the lead alien — nicknamed Mr. Grey — and the retrieved adult Duddits. Duddits had been living in an assisted care facility, watching “Sooby-Doo” reruns since childhood. It’s eventually revealed that he has a closer connection to the psychic aliens than he previously let on.
If King’s thesis was to explore the horrors of the bathroom, he seems to have strayed a bit. Instead, “Dreamcatcher” is a shapeless mishmash of King’s interests: bullies, male friend groups, psychics, B-movie-style sci-fi, and Morgan Freeman’s big, weird eyebrows. In 2014, King admitted that “Dreamcatcher” was pretty much the result of his pain meds; it was the Oxy talking. He also said that he couldn’t use a keyboard after the accident, so he wrote “Dreamcatcher” in longhand, something he was unaccustomed to.
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The results speak for themselves. And Morgan Freeman, it should be noted, hasn’t been in a Stephen King adaptation since.
