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movie review - Dreamcatcher

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

This is a flick based upon a Stephen King story, and it shows. How? By being in equal measures creepy, quite clever, and the details of characters and setting.

It starts with four life-long friends. We see a small scene from the lives of each, then watch as they head to a cabin deep in the woods of Maine for a hunting expedition. They're all good ol' American guys. They grew up in Derry (naturally), and in a series of reminiscences we learn that they befriended an otherworldly handicapped boy in their youth. A boy that somehow granted each of them 'special powers'.

Out of the blue, a man blunders into their camp. He's all roughed up, disoriented, and suffers from horrible gas. He's soon followed by an incredible herd of all of God's woodland creatures. Bears, cougars, wolves, deer, rabbits, porcupines, beavers, rabbits, you name it. All hustling through the woods in the same direction (actually, this is the best scene in the flick).

Something obvious happens after that. And then there are some clever and original bits involving Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore. But in the end it suffers from the same fate as so many King adaptations. His books are full of detail, and the stories that are based on them tend to unravel and look hurried when stripped of those details.

An example is all of the exposition. Another is Sizemore's character's sudden conversion at a point in the movie immediately following a series of disjointed scenes.

I won't get into the details of the wacky ending, but I think this one is probably better read than viewed.

Not recommended.