Shock and Awe

There are times when you witness something that burns your mind and chills your soul, something that words cannot describe, because what you have seen is beyond language, beyond comprehension. In those times, all you can do is discard sense and sanity, give up all attempts to make sense of the senseless, and just watch.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the cinematic abortion that is Dreamcatcher.

Dreamcatcher is, without a doubt, the worst movie I've seen in five years, and easily one of the worst movies I've seen ever. It's not just bad: it sails effortlessly beyond bad in the first twenty minutes, when you realize with horror that you're watching a movie about psychic friends attempting to save the world from evil slug-like aliens that explode out of people's asses.

You'd be forgiven for assuming, after reading that last bit, that Dreamcatcher is a gross-out comedy whose marketing campaign went horribly awry, a sort of Men In Black meets Dumb And Dumber. It's not. You sit there and watch and wait, even pray, for some kind of subtle humorous nod, a cinematic wink to clue you in on the joke and alleviate your fear that the once-respected Lawrence Kasdan has been struck down by a degenerative brain disorder that would cruelly allow the director of The Big Chill and Body Heat to produce this Challenger-sized catatrosphe. The wink doesn't come; what comes is the terrible knowledge that THIS MOVIE IS TAKING ITSELF SERIOUSLY, and with it, the sick feeling you might get in your stomach when confronted by an escaped mental patient with a gun who tells you, calmly and reasonably, that he's going to have to kill you unless you can tell the angels to stop beaming 50's radio jingles into his brain.

Then the psychic friend, his body controlled by an evil alien inhabiting his head, hops on a snowmobile and begins having an extended conversation with said evil alien. Who's name is Mister Gray. And who speaks, inexplicably, with a British accent.

It gets worse. Much worse. And at no point does it get even the slightest bit better. Clumps of exposition are thrown wildly at the screen like monkey feces in a zoo. Morgan Freeman shows up as a crazed military commander who's been fighting E.T.'s for twenty years and inspires loyalty from his men by shooting off their fingers. Hack dialogue of the worst caliber spews and sinks. And should I, at some point, ever meet legendary screenwriter William Goldman, I will punch him in the face, take ten dollars out of his wallet, and ask him what in the hell he was thinking.

Dreamcatcher. This Spring, crap explodes through. Try not to catch it.