The Mad King – DREAMCATCHER

I’ll be the first to admit it, I can be a bad movie snob.   When I hear people in the general public exclaim “That was the worst movie ever made!” I chuckle, clean my monocle, and reply, “You, sir, have no idea.”  The average moviegoer’s mind cannot even conceive the depths of the cinematic atrocities I’ve seen.  Even when they throw out famously terrible examples like TROLL 2 or THE ROOM, I still have to shake my head.  Philistines.  Talk to me when you’ve seen a Lazar Rockwood double feature.

So when people began speaking in awe of how batshit crazy 2003’s DREAMCATCHER was, I just rolled my eyes.  Please.  First of all, its adapted from a Stephen King story, and no Stephen King movie is going to be as absurdly sublime as MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE, directed by the master himself while in a white out of cocaine.  Second, it was a big budget studio production directed by Lawrence Kasdan, the guy who made THE BIG CHILL and SILVERADO.  Third, it starred Morgan Freeman, for god’s sake.  Credibility in human form.  

Consequently, I had avoided the movie for over a decade, knowing I would be let down by whatever pedestrian level of oddness it had to offer.  Even after picking up the Blu Ray for super cheap, I kept passing it by week after week.  It wasn’t until the last few days of 2018 that I finally decided on a whim to give it a spin.  

To everyone else in the world, I’m sorry.  You were right, I was wrong.  DREAMCATCHER is fucking nuts.

The Capsule:

Four friends—Henry the psychologist (Thomas Jane), Pete the car salesman (Timothy Olyphant), Jonesy the college professor (Damian Lewis), and Beaver the, um, barfly (Jason Lee)—meet up for their annual retreat to a snowbound hunting cabin to reminisce about the good old days.  Unfortunately, their revelry is interrupted by an alien contagion that causes the infected to shit out toothy, penis-shaped monsters.  Just when it seems they will all be overcome by ass lampreys, an alien hunting army unit lead by Colonel Abe Curtis (Morgan Freeman) rolls in to contain the infection.  Unfortunately, Curtis’ idea of containment  involves the liberal application of bullets on anyone within the quarantine zone.  Extra unfortunately, the leader of the dick monsters, known as Mr. Grey (or Ister Gay, depending on who you ask), has possessed Jonesy and is high tailing it towards the reservoir with the intent of spreading the ass born invasion across the entire population.  The only thing standing in the way of global infestation are the friends’ psychic powers (did I not mention they were psychic?) and their connection to a Scooby Doo obsessed special needs kid named Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg).

DREAMCATCHER is a grower, not a shower.  It does not unload all of its mad majesty on you at once.  This isn’t to say it starts off conventionally.  We are pelted with psychic phenomenon, unexplained suicide attempts, and spontaneous resurrections within the first fifteen minutes.  Even after people start having explosive bouts of alien ass lampreys, though, I remained skeptical.  It was weird, but still not up to my high standards.  Then, halfway through and wholly without explanation, Jonesy, possessed by the alien leader, starts speaking with a British accent.  And I’m talking a full on “Pip, pip, cheerio old chap,” Rex Harrison in MY FAIR LADY level British accent.  From that point on, resistance was futile.  DREAMCATCHER had me in its certifiable clutches.

Most of the truly bonkers movies I'm familiar with have the same limitations that a tiny budget and no experience bring, so I'm adjusted to the stilted acting, laughable effects, and excessive padding.  With its huge budget and professional production, DREAMCATCHER (mostly) avoids those issues.  It's cast with honest to god good actors (again, Morgan Freakin’ Freeman), so there are no embarrassing bad performances.  Jane is nowhere near as fun as he is in DEEP BLUE SEA (itself a movie that is no slouch when it comes to bonkers), but he does a solid job.  Jason Lee does his Jason Lee shtick, complete with some aggressively Stephen King-isms like “fuckarow” and “criminettlies,” but he never descends into MALLRATS levels of obnoxious.  While still a few years away from his charismatic stride (THE CRAZIES), Timothy Olyphant has a certain whinny charm.  The CGI effects are wince inducing at times, but what can you expect from 2003?.  I don’t really hold that against it.  Kasdan's direction is solid, and John Seale's cinematography is quite lovely.  The real lunacy comes from the script, though not having read the novel, I'm not sure if the blame (or genius) is more from King or screenwriter William Goldman.  Since King wrote the book during his recovery from a near fatal car accident, and possibly in a haze of pain meds, I lean towards him.  Whoever was responsible, I am grateful.

The film has too many “wait, what?” moments to document in the space of a blog post, so I’ll pick a few choice highlights.  The first is a oddly reoccurring theme in horror/sci-fi: the person with astonishing gifts who utterly fails to take advantage of them.  Hmm, what should I do with my psychic powers?  Negotiate peace deals between warring nations?  Unravel long hidden crimes?  Locate missing people?  I know, I’ll become a car salesman!  Seriously, the only thing Pete uses his preternatural tracking power for is literally to find lost keys.  It can't even find him a date.  All four friends treat their superpowers like an embarrassing party trick.  You would think mind reading would be a helpful skill for a psychiatrist, but Henry actually drives his patients to suicide.  Beaver seems to be the most emotionally fulfilled member of the group, and he’s a barfly who picks up women on Bingo night.  Their high school guidance counselor really failed these kids.

This next one is a minor, but astonishingly baffling, plot point.  Jonesy finds a despondent, wickedly flatulent hunter lost in the woods, and even though he is clearly infected with something awful, he and Beaver let Patient Zero take a nap in their cabin.  Once again, huge psychic fail.  Later, they find him covered in blood, sitting on the toilet, having just dropped a load that not only killed him, but is thumping angrily in the bowl.  Beaver traps it by sitting on the lid while Jones runs to the tool shed looking for tape.  This is not the crazy part.  The crazy part comes when the justifiably anxious Beaver wants a stress-relieving chew on a toothpick, but the toilet horror bumps the lid and his picks go flying.  The scene becomes a tense balancing act as Beaver tries to reach one of the toothpicks without letting the ass-born menace escape.  Now, I’m all for suspension of disbelieve, but who the fuck would even consider putting a toothpick from the bathroom floor in their mouth???  Not to mention that the floor is covered in blood leaked from a diseased man’s rectum.  I know people have weird compulsions, but goddamn.  Sorry Beav, you deserve an ass lamprey to the face for even harboring such an impulse.

Then there are parts that seem reasonable, even clever, but are absolutely insane when you think about it.  Early on, Joney mentions his “memory warehouse,” the place in his head where he files away all his experiences.  Nothing super weird there, a lot of people use that sort of mental organization.  The thing is, it's a METAPHOR.  No one literally envisions a sprawling, elaborately detailed, multi-story building where they cart around bankers boxes labeled “60's Folk Lyrics” or “Bathroom Obsessions.” Yet, not only are we given a tour of Jonesy’s mental warehouse, a significant portion of the movie depicts his detached psyche hiding from Mr. Grey inside the office, or racing to secure secret memory boxes with a monster slithering in pursuit.  

The peak of absurdity comes when Henry is wondering out loud where Jonesy could be.  “Come on Jonesy, just call 1-800-HENRY.”  Cut to Jonesy, who, sure enough, picks up an actual goddamn phone from his imaginary desk.  Regrettably, we don’t see him physically dial 1-800-43679 (that’s not even a valid US extension).  We do get to see Henry hear the ringing, hold a pistol to his head like it was a phone receiver, and earnestly have a conversation through it.  

This movie kicks restraint right in the balls.

It is a bold choice to take the phallic inspired Xenomorph design from ALIEN and carry it to its farthest extreme by having the Earth invaded by a race of telepathic space wangs.  Sure, the ass lamprey's shape is blatantly suggestive as it slithers menacingly towards the camera, but the adult aliens leave nothing to the imagination.  They are giant cocks with legs, like something escaped from the porn version of JURASSIC PARK.  The mighty E-Rex, if you will.  Some might say this is just an unfortunate oversight by the creature design team, but the alien life cycle shows the truth.  You see, ass lampreys are capable of laying multiple eggs outside of a host, which quickly hatch into tadpole versions of itself.  This means there is no biological reason the aliens need to gestate inside a mammal until bursting forth from the anus, they are just into that sort of thing.  Not coincidentally, adult dick monsters disguise themselves to their human victims by mentally projecting the image of the classic big eyed “visitor” aliens, and we all know what kind of probing those guys are known for. This species is not colonizing the planet for resources or expanding its territory, it's just pursuing its twisted ass fetish.

Incidentally, it turns out the aliens have been unsuccessfully trying to take over the planet for 25 years(!), making them even worse invasion planners than those water-allergic dumbasses from SIGNS.    

Paradoxically, the movie does have a single moment of restraint, in the [Spoiler] death of Col. Curtis.  Freeman never shies away from pushing his paranoid alien hunter to 11, whether he’s shooting the finger off a disobedient soldier in an office meeting or mowing down a pleading herd of dick monsters from his gunship, so his ultimate fate feels like a letdown.  Curtis, in a commandeered helicopter, hunts down Henry and his own turncoat second –in-command, Otis (you know your movie is nuts when Tom Sizemore is the rational one).  Otis returns fire (with a pistol!) and disables the helicopter, which crashes in a fireball just beyond the treeline.  Bor-ing.  

However, if you look in the deleted scenes, you are rewarded with the following.  After Otis shoots up the helicopter, Curtis screams “Son of a bitch” and JUMPS out of the helicopter, firing a machine gun at Otis as he plummets hundreds of feet.   He is then impaled through the chest on a tree top, which snaps off, sending Curtis’ body smashing into every branch on the way down to the ground.  And then the helicopter falls on him.  Why Kasdan chose to trim this sequence of pure brilliance is the biggest head scratcher in the film.

Trust me, I’m only scratching the surface here (I haven't even mentioned Donnie Wahlberg playing the Leukemia suffering, Down Syndrome psychic mentor, Duddits) .  There is so much crazy packed into this deranged gem that it will take me multiple watches to completely wrap my head around it.  Maybe King’s novel explains some of the more ponderous elements, but I prefer to make my own theories (pervy dick monsters).  This experience has convinced me not to be such a snob, though.  Gloriously batshit movies can be found from even the shiniest of big studio productions.  

C Chaka

Lust In Space - FORBIDDEN WORLD

The late ‘70s and early ‘80s were a magical time for Roger Corman’s New World Pictures.  The summer blockbuster was still a new, exploitable beast and no one exploited like Corman.  He knew what people wanted and he would give it to them cheaper, faster, and trashier.  The fun of New World’s rip-offs was that they were rarely straight copies of popular movies.  They seemed straightforward, but actually diverged in weird, wonderful ways creating mad scientist mash-ups like; BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (STAR WARS + THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN + The Waltons), STARCRASH (STAR WARS + BARBARELLA + Italy), GALAXY OF TERROR (ALIEN + acid trip).  Perhaps the sleaziest, cheapest, and most ridiculous of Corman’s chimeras was FORBIDDEN WORLD (ALIEN + STAR WARS + softcore porn).  

The Capsule:

Intergalactic Troubleshooter and space Lothario, Mike Colby (Jesse Vint) is sent to Xarbia to help some panicking scientists.  It seems they have accidentally created a bloodthirsty mutant organism, as scientist tend to do.  Sexy Dr. Glaser (June Chadwick) seems really glad to see Mike; Dr. Hauser (Linden Chiles) and sweaty security chief Richards (Scott Paulin) less so.  While Mike gets better acquainted with the lady doctor, Subject 20, the mutant in question, grows larger and starts taking out the more dim members of the compound.  Conflict builds between Hauser, who wants to protect his deadly wonder of science, and Mike who wants not to be eaten.  Rapidly gaining intelligence, Subject 20 has a plan of its own that no one will like.  

Directed by Allan Holzman, FORBIDDEN WORLD is not to be confused with FORBIDDEN PLANET, though that was obviously Corman’s intent, because the title makes no sense, otherwise.  The only thing forbidden on this world is common sense.  It is also known as MUTANT, which is more appropriate since it is about a mutant, but should not to be confused with MUTANT from 1984, which stars Wings Hauser and is about zombies.  

The movie slams out of the gate with a dizzying open that ambitiously rips off ALIEN, 2001, and STAR WARS all at the same time.  Mike is awakened from hypersleep by his trusty robot sidekick, SAM-104 (Don Olivera)—who sounds and looks like an eleven year-old boy in a homemade stormtrooper costume—to find his ship is under attack by, um, pirates?  It’s hard to discern because like all Corman’s sci-fi movies of that period, it repurposes the space battle scenes from BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS (that footage cost a ton of money, damn it).  It cuts from unrelated spaceships blasting lasers to Mike and SAM pushing buttons on a set while a view screen—which is behind them—shows random explosions.  Some of the explosion happen on the surface of a planet, so maybe it’s a screensaver.  

Once we get to the forbidden planet world of Xarbia, the mood abruptly switches tracks from sci-fi action to sci-fi porn.  Studly Mike is greeted—and eye fucked—by Dr. Glaser, slinking around in her low-cut jumpsuit.  It is so close to parody that I’m surprised they didn’t make Mike a space-pizza delivery boy rather than a troubleshooter.  Seriously, what kind of deep space science facility has a sauna?  When Mike stumbles in on clothing averse Tracy (Dawn Dunlap), her reaction is predictable.  “How dare you? Get out!  Wait, since you’re already here, we might as well have sex.”  Paraphrasing, but not by much.  And this is after he has already bedded Dr. Glaser.

The most egregiously porn-set scene comes after a traumatic death of one of the stupid, stupid crew members.  Dr. Glaser comforts the distraught Tracy in the way all professional colleagues do, by giving her a backrub as they both stand naked in the sauna.  This is only a guess, but I’d bet that was a script note from Roger.  “Heavy exposition scene.  Recommend boobs.”

Not everyone lusts after Troubleshooter Mike, some just resent him.  Head scientist Dr. Hauser is ruffled to find he is no longer the cock of the walk as far as eligible space bachelors go.  Richards, the security chief, is understandably grumpy since the monster got his girlfriend Annie just before Mike arrives.  Of course, the twitchy perv blows all inherent sympathy by watching Mike and Dr. Glazer go at it on the security monitor.  The monster might have done Annie a favor in that situation.

The facility roster isn’t exclusively horn-dogs.  Engineer Beale (Ray Oliver) is happy to just chill and play his space flute.  Then there’s obsessive Dr. Timbergen (Fox Harris, the loon in the radioactive Chevy Malibu from REPO MAN), who has no time for hygiene, much less love.  He comes to lunch still wearing his blood-stained lab coat and scoops up a biological sample with his fingers.  If this were a cop movie, he would be the coroner who does an autopsy while eating a sandwich.  

Of course, the one thing the residents of this interstellar Club Med lack more than inhibitions is any hint of self-preservation.  When Mike arrives, the scientists nonchalantly walk him through a lab literally dripping with blood and test animal guts to show him Subject 20, which is now cocooned in a plastic, completely unsecured incubator.  After explaining how dangerous it is, everyone leaves it in the care of the janitor, ironically named Jimmy Swift (Michael Bowen). Swift manages to do one better than ALIEN’s Kane by sticking his head directly underneath the cocoon as it undulates and leaks goo.  Cut to security footage of Swift flailing around with a giant black loogie dissolving his face, smashing into every piece of glass in the lab and spraying blood onto the camera, which no one is paying any attention to.  

I enjoy how Mike, who "does not know a gene from a jelly bean” is belittled by the scientists for wanting to destroy the creature.  Dr. Hauser is adamant about protecting their scientific accomplishment, even though it is actively killing his co-workers, and defends his position until the end.  His end, at least, which isn’t long.  Dr. Glaser is keen on communicating with it, hoping to use a computer link to ask it questions like, “Why do you enjoy killing humans so much?” and “Is there any chance we can persuade you to not eat us?”  Her efforts are rewarded by being shish kabobbed on a mutant tentacle.  

Of course, the scientists' most shortsighted endeavor was creating the mutant in the first place.  It could less be described as an accident than as a thoroughly intentional, highly complicated experiment in mass suicide.  First, they develop a fast replicating virus that instantly mutates any life form it touches, then for kicks, they spice it up with human DNA, inject it into a fertilized egg, and implant it—completely voluntarily—into one of the scientists.  Who could possibly have foreseen any complications?  This group would reject Wile E. Coyote as a member for being too risk averse.     

The fully grown Subject 20 is an imposing ALIEN knock-off, or it would be, if it was anything more than a completely immobile plastic statue.  Early on, it has two modes of attack, sitting completely still and waiting for someone to lean close to its mouth, or getting shoved off something by the film crew to simulate motion.  Later, it develops spiky tentacles and the ability to open its mouth, making it more dangerous.  Plus, it provides the opportunity to use a POV shot from inside its chomping jaws.  Having eyes inside your mouth seems disadvantageous, but the mutant makes it work.

I should note that, according to the stories, the substance invented for the mutant’s acid blood actually was caustic to flesh, making the prop more dangerous in real life than on the screen.

As I mentioned in my reviews of GALAXY OF TERROR and HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP, New World was where a young Jim Cameron spent his formative years, working in production and art design for their sci-fi films before becoming the director of the illustrious PIRANHA II: THE SPAWNING.  Even as trashy and ridiculous as these movies are, it’s fun to catch all the quick shots and setups that made their way into Cameron’s undisputed masterpiece, ALIENS. For instance, Mike is unable to use his laser in the mutant’s lair because it has coiled around the life support system, which echoes the Colonial Marines having to sling their heavy weapons in the xenomorph nest for fear of hitting the reactor’s coolant system.  And SAM the robot’s being ripped in half by the end stage mutant echoes Bishop’s fate at the hands of the Alien Queen.  I’m sure these were just subconscious inspirations, I don’t recall ALIENS having a space sauna.  Not in the final draft, anyway. 

The golden days of New World are long gone, as are its cheap, crazy mashup B movies.  It’s about time someone got those going again.  Who wouldn’t want to see CAPTAIN AMERICA + A QUIET PLACE + 50 SHADES OF GREY?  On second thought.

C Chaka