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

Wendy Darling – THE SHINING

It is by no stretch to call THE SHINING is a masterpiece.  Not just my kind of masterpiece, either, which may vary wildly from the standard definition.  The grand status of this film is a widely held opinion.  It is the defining cinematic statement on atmosphere.  Stanley Kubrick gets the lion’s share of the praise, which is valid, given the movie is 100% his vision.  Jack Nicholson is also lauded for his supremely disquieting portrayal of Jack Torrance, again justifiably.  We also think of the weird little kid croaking “Redrum” over and over.  I feel that people tend to overlook (ha ha, Shining pun) Shelley Duvall’s contribution to the movie, though.  This is despite the fact that the terrified face of Wendy Torrance is just as iconic as Nicholson’s “Here’s Johnny” pose.  That terror is usually the first and only aspect of her performance that comes up.  With all her shrieking and shivering, Wendy is rarely used as an example in lists of strong female characters.  I don’t think that is a fair assessment.  THE SHINING has at least a semi-annual spot in my October horror line up, so with this viewing I focused entirely on the poor, put upon housewife, and found that Wendy is more than meets the eye.

Wendy Torrance (Shelley Duvall) finds her simple life upended when her emotionally distant, recently sober husband, Jack (Jack Nicholson), hauls her and their spooky ass six-year-old son, Danny (Danny Lloyd) deep into the Colorado mountains to the scenic Overlook Hotel just as the place is shutting down for the winter.  For five months, the family of three will be the sole occupants of the cavernous hotel while Jack looks after the place and works on his great American novel.  Even though her selfish hubby is the only one happy with the arrangement, Wendy puts on a smile and tries to make the most of it.  The Overlook’s grand features like the gilded ballrooms, bold carpet patterns, and the challenging hedge maze soon lose their appeal, and Wendy’s days are filled with tense monotony.  With the increasingly cranky Jack pounding away at his typewriter at all hours, and Danny incessantly tooling around the hallways on his Big Wheel, the only human contact Wendy gets is chatting for a couple of minutes with the local rangers by radio.  Sure, there’s always Tony, the little boy who lives in Danny’s mouth, but who the hell wants to listen to that downer.  To make matters worse, she starts to suspect her no account husband has fallen off the wagon, thanks to his mysterious new pal, Lloyd the Bartender (Joe Turkel). Plus, he might have taken up with that child abusing floozy in Room 237 (Lia Beldam/Billie Gibson).  When she discovers that Jack’s big writing project has all been a sham for him to goof off with his ghost friends, Wendy finally puts her foot—and her bat—down.  Jack winds up in the dog house (or technically, locked in the pantry) until his enabling bar buddy, Grady (Philip Stone), butts in and riles him up into a confrontational mood.  Wendy has had enough of her husband’s bullshit, though, and has made up her mind to take Danny out of this unhealthy environment and leave Jack in the cold.

The biggest takeaway from my Wendy-centric viewing was that I rarely considered the Torrance family before coming to the Overlook Hotel.  There is not a lot of footage, just two scenes of Wendy and Danny in their small Boulder apartment and the one scene of them on the road to the hotel.  These scenes are key to understanding Wendy’s character, however, and why she reacts the way she does.  Her timid deference and forced smiles are classic symptoms of a woman in an abusive marriage.   

There is no indicator Jack lifted a hand to her prior to their winter getaway, but at the very least, he was emotionally abusive.  Nicholson lays on the contempt and condescension as thick as the Colorado snow in every word he speaks to his wife on the way to the hotel.  Obviously, the abuse becomes exponentially worse once the ghosts start driving him mad, but it was present from the start. 

The scene in the apartment where the doctor examines Danny has another classic example of abused spouse behavior.  Wendy bends over backwards to put a spin on the accident that put Danny in the hospital when he was younger.  Oh, no big deal, my drunk husband yanked up our three-year-old son so hard he dislocated his little shoulder.  Just one of those things that happens all the time.  Smile, smile.  She also lies, or at least misleads, about the timing of the accident in relation to when Jack stopped drinking, making it out to be the silver lining when they really weren't connected.  She is trying to convince herself as much as to the doctor.

It is easy to see why Jack takes to the Overlook so quickly.  Jack is the Overlook.  Just like the haunted hotel, he is cold, distant, and unsettling.  Underneath his pleasant-ish façade, dark desires and malicious impulses dwell.  Not much effort was required to nudge old Jack from simmering, resentful father to raving psychopath.  He’s certainly having a lot more fun in life once the safety cap comes off.  Jack is such an easy mark that the ghosts must have been hi-fiving each other when he walked through the door.  Or whatever the 1920s ghost version of a hi-five is.  

I was not exaggerating when I called Wendy Torrance an icon.  She is instantly recognizable to anyone familiar with horror, Kubrick, or cinema in general.  No one else looks like Wendy, not even Duvall in real life or in other roles.  One factor is the wardrobe.  Wendy defines mom casual to such a degree she seems to have walked straight out of the women’s apparel section of the 1978 Sears catalogue.  Name one other person who could pull off wearing a bright red long sleeve shirt and stockings under a blue Raggedy Anne dress?  Other than your mom in the '70s. 

Another factor is the actress herself, who does not conform in typical Hollywood model.  Duvall had a very nontraditional beauty and physicality, and those traits were amplified with Wendy.  With her thin face and huge, wide eyes, Wendy is almost birdlike.  She looks like a fragile creature, even before being overtaken by terror.  Once things really go south, Duvall throws herself so deeply into fear that she is practically the physical version of Munch’s The Scream.  I think the only person who tops Duvall’s commitment to hysteria is Marilyn Burns from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.  

The thing is, even though Wendy seems frail and timid, looks can be deceiving.  Both Jack and his misogynist ghost buddies totally underestimate her.  Jack spends too much time savoring her confusion after she discovers his “manuscript” that he gives Wendy the opportunity to clean his clock, even if she is holding the bat all wrong.  Wendy, on the other hand, wastes no time getting her momentarily disabled husband locked away tight.  If it wasn’t for some spectral intervention from Grady, he would be in that pantry until spring.  

A slight aside about the manuscript reveal.  “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” is another bit from the movie that has been forever entrenched into pop culture (even Homer Simpson paraphrased it).  The scene is so well known that it almost loses its impact.  When you really think about it, though, that shit is devastating.  Wendy’s perception of Jack suddenly tilts from “grouchy and on edge” to “totally divorced from reality,” and that he has been that way for a long time.  Even if he is only repeating the same sentence over and over, that is months of work at a manual typewriter, especially with all the creative formatting.  Which means Jack was off the deep end almost from the very beginning.   

Additionally, it makes the scene early on where he is being an absolute dick to her when she interrupts his “work” that much worse.  The nerve of that guy.  This motherfucker didn’t lose his train of thought, he was only working with ten words.  All that time she was busy doing his real job of maintaining the hotel for him, he was just slacking off and having drinks at the bar during Ghost Happy Hour!  She should have busted him upside the head right then.

Another aside - I hope my wife doesn’t think this is what I’m doing when I say I´m working on my blog.  

Yes, Wendy does settle in for a nap after she locks up her psycho hubby in pantry prison, but you can’t blame her.  It has been an emotionally draining few hours.  The second Jack starts hacking away at the bedroom door, though, Wendy is back on the clock.  She doesn’t waste time trying to question or reason with a man swinging an axe, she gets Danny (temporarily) out of danger and slices open Jack’s hand when he reaches through the door to unlock it.  Some might say she is saved when Jack is distracted by Dick Hollorann (Scatman Crothers), but I think Wendy had a good chance of taking out the bastard even if he forced his way into the bathroom.  At this point, Wendy had already given Jack a cracked noggin, a bad limp, and a lacerated hand.  The worst injury she’s had is a sore throat from all that screaming.  

Speaking of Dick Hollorann, this poor dude has even worse luck than Wendy.  He should have been safe as houses in his swank Florida bachelor’s pad, but he’s such a decent guy that he can’t ignore Danny’s call for help that comes shining into his dome.  He flies all the way across the country, drives up a mountain in a blizzard, and slowly plows the rest of the way up in a rented Snow-Cat, only to get an axe in the chest as soon as he walks in the hotel.  Thanks Danny, that worked out well.  I’m glad for any screen time I can get, though, because 1) Scatman is always a welcome addition, and 2) he gives the best “what the fuck are you talking about” expressions ever.  

The primary action from that point on is between Jack and Danny, but there’s no down time for Wendy.  The Overlook pulls out all the stops to drive her off the deep end, slapping her with one nightmarish vision after the other.  She even gets hit with an insane bit of furry fellatio, a scene that left me as confused as Wendy the first time I saw it as a clueless preteen.  No judgments now, of course.  However two consenting adults, alive or dead, want to express themselves is fine by me.  In this context, though, it’s still a bit of a shocker.  Despite the decayed partygoers and elevators of blood, Wendy refuses to crack up.  She escapes the hotel, scoops Danny into her arms, and trucks away in Hollorann’s Snow-Cat, leaving Jack lost and alone, destined to become an ice sculpture.  

Incidentally, wouldn’t it be fitting if Ghost Jack gets stuck in a crummy service job for all eternity, like Grady and Lloyd?  Having to wander the hedge maze every day in overalls, forced to keep the bushes tidy.  All three of them hanging out at the bar after hours, just complaining about women.  Losers.

So, while Wendy Torrance may seem to be a weak, hysterical pushover at first glance, when you really dig into it, she kicks all sorts of ass, both physical and ethereal.  I hope Danny appreciates what a great mom he has and make her a really awesome macaroni picture for her next Mother’s Day.  Maybe get Tony to lighten up a little bit around her, too.  I have the feeling that little boy inside her son’s mouth really freaks her out.  In any event, let’s raise a glass to the indomitable Mrs. Torrance, who left her good for nothing husband and a hotel of unspeakable evil in the rearview of a dead man’s Snow-Cat.  Cheers.

C Chaka