The retarded will save the world. This is what I
learned from watching the latest Steven King adaptation “Dreamcatcher”,
directed by Hollywood veteran Lawrence Kasdan. This is not the
first time that King taught us that developmentally disabled
people have magical powers. In “The Green Mile”, we
were told that the “slow” death row inmate, played
by Michael Clark Duncan, had the ability to heal the sick, punish
the wicked, and restore Tom Hanks’ wilting penis. This
time around, it is Duddets (Donnie Wahlberg), a developmentally
disabled boy, who gives the four main characters the powers
of telepathy, radar, and the ability to know the traffic and
the weather without turning on the morning news.
When the film begins, the four psychic friends have met up for
a winter hunting trip deep in the woods of Maine. There’s
Henry Devlin (Thomas Jane), the suicidal psychiatrist. Gary
'Jonesy' Jones (Damian Lewis) the college professor. Peter Moore
(Timothy Olyphant) is a car salesman, and Beaver (Jason Lee),
who has a toothpick in his mouth. Seriously. That is the only
defining aspect of The Beav’s character. When off hunting
in the woods, Jonesy and Beaver come across a burping and farting
hunter who had been lost in the snow for days. Apparently, he
is burping and farting because his body has been infested by
an alien parasite that has come to this planet to take over
the world.
Another thing I learned from watching “Dreamcatcher”:
people who fart are possessed by evil aliens. This all makes
sense now. When I was a child, and my older brother used to
hold me down and fart in my face, he was actually an alien trying
to infect me with his parasites. And all this time my parents
never believed me.
After it becomes apparent that this is an evil alien infestation,
and not a good one, the military is called in. The secret military
operation, which has apparently been fighting this alien menace
for a while, is led by Colonel Abraham Kurtz (Morgan Freeman).
Since all of rural Maine seems to be infected by these fart
monsters, and the only way to protect the rest of America from
the New England Fart Monsters is to exterminate all the people
who are infected by said fart monsters, Colonel Kurtz has to
make the hardest decisions of his military career: All New England
Fart Monsters Must Die.
These are only some of the many plot threads crammed into “Dreamcatcher”.
I have not yet mentioned the “mental warehouse”, Scooby
Doo as a war cry, scatological references in cinema, and an
alien mastermind who speaks with an effete British accent. I
saw this movie three days ago and I still haven’t figured
out how Native American Dreamcatchers fit in to any of this.
It was as if King just pasted together random chapters from
all his prior novels. Despite everyone’s best efforts,
the film doesn’t add up to a cohesive whole. It just doesn’t
gel.
The timeline of events in the film doesn’t make sense,
either. When we flash back to when the main characters were
children, a title card reads “Twenty Years Ago”. Twenty
years ago was 1983, not, as it seemed in the film, 1957. If
the filmmakers wanted to be accurate, the child actors wouldn’t
be singing “Singing the Blues” by Guy Mitchell, but
probably “Relax”, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
While “Dreamcatcher” ultimately is a deeply unsatisfying
movie, it does have some amazing gross-out set pieces, which,
on their own, are almost worth the price of admission. One of
them is bound to go down in film history as one of the best
horror scenes ever, destined to do for the toilet what “Psycho”
did for the shower.
Unlike “Alien”, when the parasites break out of the
person’s chest, in “Dreamcatcher” they use an,
um, existing orifice. That’s right, folks, the New England
Fart Monsters break out of their host’s anuses and transform
into New England Shit Monsters. One of these Shit Monsters-
which look remarkably like the evil Snake Head fishes that terrorized
America last summer (another thing I learned from “Dreamcatcher”:
the Snake Head fish really was evil)- ends up in a toilet bowl.
It is up to the tooth-pick chewing Jason Lee to close the lid
and sit on it, trapping the Snake Head Evil Alien New England
Shit Monster in the bowl, as his friend searches the house for
some duct tape to hold the lid shut. Another thing I learned:
The government is right. Duct Tape can save the world!
So, while holding the Snake Head Evil Alien New England Shit
Monster (SHEANESM for short) Jason Lee decides to calm his nerves
by chewing on a toothpick. However, he drops his toothpicks
onto the blood-and-feces-soaked bathroom floor. Of course, there
is one toothpick, slightly out of arm’s reach, which doesn’t
have that much blood and feces on it. So now Lee has to keep
his ass on the toilet seat, holding the alien in the bowl, while
trying to reach for a toothpick on the bathroom floor and put
it in his mouth! The desire for this one last toothpick, of
course, leads to bad things. He should have kept his ass on
the bowl.
There is an old expression, “Shit or get off the pot.”
One last thing I learned from this film: sometimes there is
a third option. Somewhere between shitting and getting off the
pot lies “Dreamcatcher”.
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Above:
retarded boy gives four friends psychic powers in "Dreamcatcher"
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