I hate you, Dreamcatcher.

All right. Dreamcatcher.

I remembered watching Dreamcatcher on cable in my undergrad days, but there was an odd fuzzy quality to the recollection. I knew it was bad; awful, in fact.. but I could not recall why.

I now understand the reason: I blocked it out, like a traumatic memory or painful physical injury. There are some things the conscious mind isn’t meant to retain experience from.

Dreamcatcherthe book is, according to the resident King-expert of the household, kind of a mediocre King book. Dreamcatcher the movie is a regurgitated blend of bits and pieces from an entire series of preivous King works, whether they be TV shows or films or the written word. Take one pinch of The Green Mile, a dollop of Stand by Me, a shake of Tommyknockers, a dash of The Stand, burn on the stove for an agonizing two hours sixteen minutes, then hit yourself in the face with a bat until you lose consciousness.

But, you ask, what is it *about*? What’s the story? Why do you hate it so much, and how can we seek revenge on an uncaring universe for allowing it?

The movie is ostensibly about a group of four friends from Maine, now living in the Northeast and going about their middle-aged lives. They grew up together and had wacky adventures, like Stand by Me without the talent or the drama, but moved on eventually. Oh yeah, they also have mild superpowers, which are never properly explained, and only crop up as plot devices.

The four men are jerks, and you largely wish they’d die. One works as a therapist and is a telepath, but hates his own life so much he abuses his telepathy to drive one patient to suicide. Whee! Heroic!

Another can find lost objects and uses this ability to try and score one night stands. A third is a teacher who’s too dumb to notice his students cheating so he spies on them with his telepathy to catch a poor kid who slipped up, which, eh, I dunno. It’s more moral than the shrink. Did I mention you’re really supposed to like these guys?

Eventually teacher-dude gets hit by a car after being lured into traffic by a vision of a mentally handicapped guy in his underwear. Seriously. That leads in no particular way to the film cutting to six months later the four of them going to a cabin for a getaway, as they do every year or so. Teacher man is remarkably spry for someone who should just now be getting the last pins pulled out of his spine, if he ever walked again, but we’ll move on. It’s a vacay, let’s not be downers.

At this point you’ll notice the characters dropping a ton of slang terminology to establish that they have their own cliqueish language. This is something that can be established in a book without great difficulty but would take considerable skill to do well on screen. Don’t worry; there’s no such skill. It’s just mind-numbingly annoying.

Eventually weird stuff starts happening. A snowstorm is moving in, one of the four almost kills a hunter, another two have a car accident avoiding a woman sprawled in the road, the forest animals start fleeing, etc. There’s a painful and crass extended sequence involving the near-killed hunter, who is having extremely severe gastrointestinal problems, which are apparently hilarious.

Lo and behold, it’s an alien invasion. Or something. There’s a bright red glowing fungus that sometimes turns into giant worms that rip out of your ass and kill you.

Yeah. You read that correctly. Fungus – worm – assbursters. In case the Alien reference isn’t obvious, when the Evil Military Commandos show up, we’re informed they call the fungus plague ‘The Ripley’.

Which strikes me as odd, since Ripley is the *cure* for Alien infestations, as any fan of the Alien movies could tell you.

Morgan Freeman is utterly wasted here as a crazed mass-murder inclined Man in Black who’s been putting down alien invasions for decades. Yes, decades. It’s so common they have set procedures and everything. The alien invasion model works like this: land your ship somewhere, infect the local animals with red fungus, a vanishingly small number of people hatch worm thingies, and…. somehow… they conquer the world.

Apparently the overwhelming majority of people heal from the fungus within days. It doesn’t control their minds or make them a threat, and it poorly tolerates cold. So on the Pandemic Horror scale, we’re talking somewhere between Mumps and Athlete’s Foot. But it’s a big deal, and Freeman thinks it’s time to kill the entire, mildly-infected town, before someone gets out with it. His Courageous Subordinate disagrees and plots against him to Save the Townsfolk.

So add in a generous portion of Outbreak to the mixture mentioned earlier.

If this isn’t confusing enough, it gets worse. Zip! Flatulent Hunter dies and a worm thingy kills one of the four idiot stars. Bang, zoom, another one of the cast of four is infected by a slug which is working for a Grey alien that turns into a cloud of spores and takes over his mind. Luckily he has an elaborate Mental Library system he can hide inside. The guy who can find things is coerced into finding a way for Infected Teacher Dude to get out of the quarantine zone, so that he can contaminate Boston’s water supply with a plague that many people would find preferable to the flu. Morgan Freeman uses bad CG helicopters to blow up a bad CG alien ship as the alien Greys beg for mercy in childlike voices. Infected Teacher kills the Guy with the Tracking Ability for reasons that aren’t explained, and the only one of the four still standing is the Bad Shrink, who falls into military custody and convinces the Courageous Subordinate to break him out and find their mentally handicapped friend, who has superpowers far beyond theirs and can save the world.

Seriously.

So that’s what they do. Freeman is busted by the slightly less insane regular military, and he breaks out to follow his personal Brutus in a helicopter via a magical tracking device. Subordinate and Bad Shrink retrieve his childhood friend, who it is revealed gave them all superpowers by accident finding a lost girl from his special needs school. His superpowers leaked out, ala The Green Mile. So he’s not just your mentally handicapped Deus Ex Machina, he is by extension Jesus.

Bad Shrink and Subordinate take Mentally Handicapped Jesus to stop the Possessed Teacher from contaminating Boston’s water supply. Morgan Freeman tries to stop them with a helicopter, which Subordinate shoots down using his sidearm. They both die, mercifully. Which leads to a three way confrontation over the completely unsecured Bostonian water supply between the three old friends, only one of which has a legitimate medical excuse for being this dumb.

Then the Earthshattering Truth is revealed. Their friend isn’t Mentally Handicapped Jesus. He’s actually an Alien Starbaby sent here to save mankind from bad alien invasions. Which I guess makes his whole life a lie, or an act, and allows me in non-PC terms to call him:

Retard Alien Jesus.

Retard Alien Jesus saves the day. Roll credits. Eat a gun.

I hate Dreamcatcher.

Next Week: Secret Window, which doesn’t suck
Last Week: Hearts in Atlantis