DVD Review: Lawrence Kasdan’s Dreamcatcher on Warner Home Video

If you like making jokes about what comes out of your body and into your toilet bowl, Dreamcatcher is for you.

DreamcatcherThere is one moment of glory in Dreamcatcher, and it takes place in a cabin bathroom and involves a dead hunter, a toilet housing an unspeakable alien creature, and a set of toothpicks strewn along the tiled floor. Joe “Beaver” Clarendon (Jason Lee), sitting on the toilet seat to keep the mysterious monster contained, repeatedly reaches for his toothpicks—the antidote to his nervous energy—with desperation, the seat periodically slamming into his backside with the force of a small explosion. The slowly mounting tension reaches a fever pitch as Beaver’s fingers get closer to their goal and his backside comes off the lid, before the scene culminates in an orgy of blood, flesh, and bodily waste that’s deliriously nerve-wracking.

Unfortunately, director Lawrence Kasdan—known more for dialogue-driven ensemble dramas like The Big Chill and Grand Canyon than for pulp (despite his writing credits on Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi)—finds it difficult to sustain this initial excitement. Dreamcatcher tells the tale of four lifelong friends who, as kids, rescued a mentally handicapped boy nicknamed Duddits from being tormented by the local jocks; he repays the four by granting them psychic abilities comparable to his own. Twenty years later, the four grown men—Jonesy (Damian Lewis), Pete (Timothy Olyphant), Henry (Thomas Jane) and Beaver—get together for their annual hunting trip in the Maine woodlands, and wind up in the middle of an alien invasion. Jonesy gets possessed by one of the creatures, forcing Henry to pursue his friend before Jonesy’s alien host pollutes the world’s drinking water with an apocalyptic extraterrestrial virus. All the while, both hunter and hunted must avoid the American military (personified by Morgan Freeman’s insane Colonel Curtis and Tom Sizemore’s more noble Captain Owen Underhill), who are determined to exterminate both the alien invaders and the Americans who’ve already been infected.

As in King’s derivative novel, the story is overstuffed with too many unnecessary (if occasionally cool) elements, including the dramatization of Jonesy’s mind as a memory warehouse filled with endless files on topics ranging from “sex fantasies” to “sports humiliations.” Even more problematic, however, is the fact that a preponderance of early character-driven scenes take up valuable time that would have been better spent on the third act’s truncated and ineffective chase across the snowbound Northeast. The creatures (aptly dubbed “shit weasels”) feed off their human hosts from the inside out, using one’s backdoor as an entrance and exit; the film’s acute sense of the terror derived from penetration and expulsion—farting is used as ominous foreshadowing—is reminiscent of Alien. Then again, King’s novel was never more than a hodgepodge of Alienisms, John Carpenter’s The Thing, and the author’s own The Tommyknockers and The Stand.

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As things go from eerie to gory to flat-out laughable, the actors spend an unreasonable amount of time wrestling with or staring wide-eyed at CGI creations, and the disappointing finale featuring a grown-up Duddits (played by Donnie Wahlberg in a Boston Red Sox jacket that’s at odds with his character’s eventual triumph) is as awkward as it is anticlimactic. Kasdan brings a directorial professionalism to the film that it doesn’t really deserve, and Morgan Freeman relishes his opportunity to play an unrepentant bad guy, using his commanding physical stature as a blunt weapon of imposing fierceness. In the end, though, Dreamcatcher, unlike the creature beneath Jason Lee’s posterior, never really escapes the toilet.

Image/Sound

Dreamcatcher is presented here in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen. (A separate fullscreen edition is also available.) Save for some noticeable grain, this is a very good transfer with no noticeable edge halos to take one’s attention from the transfer’s excellent color levels and accurate skin tones. Considering how much snow there is in Dreamcatcher, it’s surprising that whites aren’t at all overblown. In fact, this may be the best snow has ever looked on a DVD transfer. And there’s enough helicopters, screeching aliens and farting throughout the film’s 134-minute running to make this 5.1 Dolby Digital mix a busy one. Dialogue is clean, directional pans are excellent and the rear speakers carry the effects and sweeping score very well.

Extras

Not that the film demanded one, but there’s no commentary track on this Dreamcatcher DVD edition. If you are disappointed, though, take some comfort in the fact that “DreamMakers: A Journey Through Production” is one of the better making-of featurettes around. This piece gives a brief but nonetheless informative glimpse of the entire production, from the screenplay phase (Kasdan added elements from the novel into the script that William Goldman didn’t know what to do with) to the visual effects and the difficulties the cast and crew faced in working in subzero weather for so long. “DreamWeavers: The Visual Effects of Dreamcatcher” expands on the visual effects part included on the making-of featurette and on “DreamWriter: An Interview with Stephen King,” the famous horror writer explains how the truck accident that almost claimed his life informed the novel and, in the end, makes the film sound a whole lot more interesting than it really is. Also included here are four “lifted” scenes (sans commentary track), the film’s original ending (essentially a less CGI-dependent version of what audiences saw in theaters), the film’s theatrical trailer and cast and crew filmographies.

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Overall

If your taboo zone is in fact the bathroom or you like making jokes about what comes out of your body and into your toilet bowl, Dreamcatcher is for you.

Score: 
 Cast: Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Timothy Olyphant, Donnie Wahlberg  Director: Lawrence Kasdan  Screenwriter: William Goldman, Lawrence Kasdan  Distributor: Warner Home Video  Running Time: 134 min  Rating: R  Year: 2003  Release Date: September 30, 2003  Buy: Video, Soundtrack, Book

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