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Dreamcatcher

Watched this over the weekend with a couple of friends… I hadn’t heard the first thing about it, no previews, no reviews, no trailers, nothing. None of us had actually, so we went into it without the first clue what it was about. To sum it up, this is the absolute strangest movie I have ever seen.

The following contains spoilers, if you haven’t seen this yet but plan to, quit reading.

So it started out interesting enough… It was shaping up to be a cool psychological thriller or something, showing that the four main characters have mostly similar psychic abilities, a mysterious and strangely strong bond, and later, the ability to read each other’s and other people’s minds. Mysterious things start happening to them at the beginning, making you wonder just what is causing them to have this connection.

The four friends shortly go on their annual hunting trip deep in the woods, where strange things begin to happen. Including a lost hunter stumbling to their cabin with a really bad case of indigestion. He burps and farts for the rest of the evening, and begins to show red splotches all over his face and body. His stomach is huge and bubbling, as if you can actually see the gas bubbles moving around in there. The hunter’s explanation for his illness is that he ate some berries in the woods.

At some point during this every animal in the forest starts migrating away from something, most covered with red spots similar to those on the lost hunter. So far my friends and I were really digging the movie, as it was very mysterious and intriguing so far. Then after the animals are done migrating, two of the four guys that were assisting the lost hunter turn around to see a trail of blood from the room where he was sleeping, into the bathroom. After trying to communicate with him to no avail, they decided to break the door down, only to find the bathroom covered in blood, all apparently originating from the lost hunter’s rear end. They hear something moving in the toilet, so one of the guys jumps on the toilet to keep it from getting out. This particular guy also apparently uses toothpicks as a kind of security blanket, so he tries to take one out of his case, only to drop them all over the floor. He has to reach to get it, and gets knocked off the toilet seat by the mysterious creature within. So far it’s still pretty good, as we don’t know what the hell is in that toilet.

But here is where the whole movie completely changes and feels like you just switched the channel to another movie, but with the same actors…

Out crawls this 3 foot worm, with a large tooth filled mouth, and some crazy stabbing pokey things on the other end. What? Where the hell did this come from? There was absolutely no indication of anything like this up to this point in the movie, and came as quite a shock to us, but then we just started laughing at the silliness of it. After the worm thing kills the guy, the other guy comes back in from getting some tape from the shed, to find his friend dead on the toilet with the worm crawling around. Then a shadow goes over him, and he turns around to find a big alien staring at him. What? I thought this movie was about psychic abilities and mind reading or something? Not aliens…

Anyway, it’s all down hill from there. A super elite branch of the Army called “Blue Team” or something like that is apparently in charge of destroying the alien scum. Oh yeah, and the “boss” of that group, Morgan Freeman, has been chasing down the aliens and killing them for 25 years. But there is no back story or history of that at all. It just seems to be common knowledge that we’ve been under assault for 25 years.

Then there is the ending… 2 of the four friends from the beginning die, and one is possessed by one of the aliens somehow. But he blocks himself off in a secret corner of his brain or “Memory Warehouse”, to hide from the alien in his mind. This is actually a pretty cool idea, as it shows his mind as a large library with his memories organized in crates and files, and you can see him shuffling memories here and there with a dolly cart. It’s a cool idea, but it is just another part that doesn’t really fit into the movie as a whole.

The ending involves the aliens trying to get one worm into the Boston water supply, which will apparently infect all of earth with the virus. The aliens have a big ass space ship though, and big scary teeth, so I don’t know why they hinged the success of their entire world domination scheme on one worm making it into a little manhole inside the oddly deserted and unmonitored source of all of Boston’s water.

Then there is the little retarded guy Duddits that gave the four guys their powers in the first place. I didn’t mention him until now because the movie really doesn’t ever explain what he has to do with anything… He is apparently supposed to be really important though, since he saves the day. But you never really understand why or why you should care.

Overall this seems like about 5 different movies that got rolled into one somehow. They all could have been interesting on their own, either the psychic thing, or the alien thing could have been a good action movie if that’s all it tried to be, etc. But it ended up just being a jumbled mess in the end.