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

Shithole Alien Districts - DISTRICT 9

There has been a lot of talk lately about shithole countries.  Clearly, this is ridiculous, because while all countries have their bad areas, it is reductive and offensive to call an entire country a shithole.  All countries have areas of great beauty, people of generous character, and opportunities to offer the world.  I think what Trump meant to say, because thinly veiled racist statements are so unbecoming of a President of the United States, was "Why are there some many people wanting to immigrate from shithole districts?"  And by people, he meant aliens, since he was clearly thinking of Neill Blomkamp´s groundbreaking film examining the hellish living conditions of South Africa's infamous DISTRICT 9.  Although someone should break it to him that it isn't a documentary.

     

The Capsule:

In 2010 Johannesburg, South Africa, 1.8 million refugees are forced to live in subhuman conditions in a slum designated District 9.  The fact that the refugees are not human does not excuse their treatment in the slightest.  Back in the early 1980s, a gigantic mothership parked over Johannesburg, stranding huge numbers of blue collar aliens who didn’t know how the advanced systems of the ship worked.  Having no concept of personal property, a completely foreign social structure, and looking rather odd from a human’s perspective, the aliens were unable to assimilate and were forced into a marginalized existence, scavenging and selling advanced technology for cat food.  One industrious alien, Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope) has been working in secret for 20 years distilling enough spaceship fuel to kick start the mothership and get his people off Earth for good.  Unfortunately, bumbling racist Multi-Nation United bureaucrat Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copley) fucks it up by unknowingly confiscating the fuel canister during an illegal eviction.  Wikus gets to see how the other side lives, though, when the fluid he accidentally sprayed himself with begins to genetically transform him into an alien.  His bosses, including his father-in-law (Louis Minnaar), are so delighted at the development they can’t wait to dissect Wikus alive and harvest every part of his body for weapons research.  Escaping just before having his heart cut out, Wikus takes refuge the only place available to a freak like him, District 9.  When Christopher Johnson explains he can reverse the process on the mothership, Wikus, Christopher, and his brainy son embark on a dangerous mission to retrieve the fuel canister that will pit them against the MNU battalion of mercenaries, as well as a load of opportunistic Nigerian gangsters.  Along the way, Wikus must weigh the welfare of millions of sentient beings against his own selfish, dumbass life.

I dearly love Neill Blomkamp.  The South African director is equal parts political/social commentator and enthusiastic sci-fi movie nerd.  His allegories may not be as exquisitely nuanced as Jordan Peele’s GET OUT, but they all have robots.  That’s a fair trade, as far as I’m concerned.  While the CG in Blomkamp’s films may not age as well (though it looks lovely to me), his subject matter will likely be depressingly relevant for the foreseeable future.  

DISTRICT 9 is about South Africa’s period of apartheid.  The period of institutional racial segregation may have ended in 1991, but it’s scars linger to this day.  So much, in fact, that Blomkamp didn’t have to create the horrible living conditions of District 9, he just used an existing camp were Johannesburg’s poorest residents lived. And not years ago, either.  Some people were still living there when filming began.  His sci-fi fable wasn’t “not far removed”, it was literally overlapping.

The film may have been a sci-fi reflection of horrible abuses of apartheid, but it is more on the nose as a parable on the immigration crisis (which the film predates by six years).  The government response of herding over a million uninvited guests into a segregated refugee camp and ignoring them seems depressingly prescient.  All the other nations claim NIMBY, since the mothership literally landed in South Africa's backyard.  In Star Trek terms, it is a terrible first contact, especially for the aliens.  Most of the population views them as shiftless, hard shelled thieves.  They are shunned by the public, exploited by the Nigerian gangsters, and vivisected by the private company charged to take care of them.  Sure, the aliens may—occasionally—rip a human’s arm off, but as far as an invasion from space goes, the Earth got off pretty easy.   

By the way, the aliens are derogatorily referred to as “prawns” because of their crustacean-like appearance and scavenging ways, but I don’t want to be racially insensitive even to races that don’t exist.

The sharp script Blomkamp co-wrote with Terri Tatchell goes a long way, but the movie solidly rests on Sharlto Copley’s shoulders.  Copley is a chameleon, totally disappearing into whatever role he is given, including the three he’s done with Blomkamp and half dozen plus roles he played in HARDCORE HENRY alone.  With the exception of Elysium, where he plays an unrepentant dickhead from start to end, Copley can come off as more endearing than he has any right being.  Wikus Van De Merwe starts off as an over-privileged, incompetent, racist (speciesist?) buffoon.  He is so obtuse he doesn’t grasp the level of cruelty he is inflicting on these creatures for the sake of career advancement.  Throughout the movie, though, he slowly—and painfully—has his eyes opened to the truth.

Blomkamp and Copley must have a similar relationship as Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, because the movie gleefully puts Copley’s character through the ringer.  Wikus’ transformation starts off embarrassingly tumultuous, like when he tells his wife he might have shit his pants just as a surprise party for him starts.  After his escape from the dissection-happy employers, where his father-in-law calmly discusses how to distribute his organs as if he wasn’t listening from the table, the abuse only gets worse.  The MNU release a cover story explaining Wikus’ condition as the result of an alien STD.  No one listens when he protests “I would never have pornographic relations with one of those creatures.”

Wikus haplessly pinballs around from one predicament to the next.  Everyone wants a piece of him, from his old boss, to the homicidal head mercenary, Koobus (David James), to the Nigerians (they just want to cut his arm off, he can keep the rest).  He also has to endure some Cronenburg-esque body horror as bits of him keep falling off.  It’s hard not to feel bad for the schlub, even if he completely deserves it.

The sharp political satire and self-reflection is great, but once Wikus and Christopher Johnson get their hands on an alien armory, the movie switches tracks into a gloriously excessive orgy of sci-fi action.  The weapons roster is straight out of a video game.  Lightning gun, check.  Magnetic launcher, check.  Explosion gun (I guess), check.  No matter what they use, the result is a crimson mist where there used to be a mercenary.  Also, I believe this is the only movie to use a pig carcass as a deadly, high speed projectile.

The squee factor goes through the roof when Wikus climbs inside the alien mech (drivable robot with gun arms, for any non-nerds out there).  It’s a nice touch that the mech resembles the alien physique, even down to the dangly feeler things coming off the mouth.  It is also equipped with so much hardcore geek bling that it deserves to be pained on the side of a van.  

Even with all the fan service, the climax in District 9 is incredibly tense and emotionally engaging.  It doesn’t start off as Wikus’ finest hour.  Not only does he screw up Christopher Johnson’s 28 year old plan to fly the command shuttle back to the mothership, his first action when suited up inside the badass mech is to run away.  However, his newly found empathy ultimately wins out over cowardice and he takes on Koobus’ whole team of heavily armed killers to give Christopher Johnson and his son a chance to escape.  

I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted a sequel as badly as I want one for this movie.  The questions left dangling are meaty enough to satisfy a pit bull.  The biggest question, somewhat rhetorically, is how badly are we, as a species, fucked when that mothership comes back.  Despite Wikus’ eventual altruism and a few people eloquently speaking for change without actually doing any of it, this incident casts quite a shadow on the human race.  One of the most damning—and, let’s face it, realistic—strikes against us is that even though everyone acknowledges that a fleet of highly pissed off aliens are likely on its way to Earth, no one has changed their behavior in the slightest!  The aliens are still treated like subhuman shit and corralled in an internment camp.  If we were smart, the aliens would suddenly be our new best friends.  We would move them into the suburbs, give them all the cat food they want, offer them a few free continuing education classes down at the community college.  Maybe, I don’t know, come up with a non-derogatory name for them.  The returning armada would see through that bullshit in a second, but we might score some points for effort.

The only real hope we have is that the alien overlords are just as big of assholes as we are.  They have a caste system where the workers are deprived of education, initiative, and self-determination.  The complete alien society might exist in perfect harmony, with all classes benefiting through selfless cooperation, but it sounds more like some majorly bougie shit to me.  Wouldn’t it be as ironic as hell if the mothership ended up on Earth as an attempt by the workers to escape a life of slavery and discrimination?  Christopher Johnson (not his alien name, I'm guessing) rallying the downtrodden by saying, “Come on fellas, where ever we end up has to be better than this!”  Then he spent the next 28 years going “How was I supposed to know?”

Damn, now I need a prequel and a sequel.

Even without a clear resolution, the movie ends on a hopeful note.  It shows that even the most narrow minded, myopic lunkhead can make a change.  All that is needed is to see the humanity in others, metaphorically or not. 

C Chaka