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

I'm Just Saying: THE CRAZIES (2010)

Last week, I scrapped my plans to write about an apocalyptic movie in honor of a Trump presidency, since there was no way that could possibly happen.  So let me say it is purely coincidental that this week I’m writing about a bunch of insane people in the Mid-West who just might bring about the destruction of our country.  Zero connection with current events.  Honestly, I just re-watched this one during my October horror binge and remembered how great a movie it is.  I am in no way making allusions between Trump voters and the 2010 remake of THE CRAZIES.   

Other than the title.  

The Capsule:

Life is simple in the quiet town of Ogden Marsh, Iowa.  At least until some of the residents start to go a little off—doing things like zoning out, repeating themselves, and walking into a high school baseball game with a loaded shotgun.  It might have something to do with that mysterious military plane that crashed in the river, releasing a doozy of a biological weapon into the town’s drinking water.  Just as Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) starts to piece together what is happening to his formerly non-murderous neighbors, the Army descends on the entire town, putting everyone under quarantine.  Soon things get out of hand, and David, his doctor wife Judy (Radha Mitchell), her assistant, Becca (Danielle Panabaker), and Deputy Russell (Joe Anderson) decide to make a break for it.  To make it to safety, they will need to get past not only a town full of crazies, but a military containment unit whose idea of treatment is liberally applied bullets, followed by a flamethrower.

Superficial analogies aside, THE CRAZIES isn’t a democratic nightmare, it’s a libertarian one.  For the law abiding citizens of Ogden Marsh, the government is literally out to get them.  The remake is even more blatant about it than George Romero’s 1973 original.  His version focused much more on the military’s attempt to contain and even cure the Trixie virus they accidentally unleashed.  The Army in the original is similarly at odds with the survivors—the troops herd up the town’s residents and don't hesitate to put down the infected.  The motives of those in charge of the operation are notably more sympathetic, though.  The Army commander is frustrated with the logistic and bureaucratic obstacles preventing him from helping the residents.  The head scientist works (and complains) tirelessly to find a cure.  They are trying their best, and they are anguished that it is not enough.

The remake gives us none of that.  The motives of the military, and presumably the government itself, are never made clear.  Are they trying to stop a pandemic, like professional stone-faced government guy Glenn Morshower says, or are they just trying to cover up their involvement?  They are aware of what is going on, but they do not intervene until David finds the evidence that can implicate them.  It seems like an accident, but they knowingly created the virus in the first place.  Even though the plot is grade A conspiracy theory paranoia, it’s not totally unthinkable that someone would want to manage the PR impact.  The truth is going to look bad.  Wiping out a town—or all of Iowa—is not something you can just blame on an intern.

Still, things aren’t completely black and white.  With their gas masks on, the troops are a faceless, merciless mob of killers, pulling crying children from their parents’ arms.  Take the mask away, though, and they are just normal people.  The kid that David and Russell capture and interrogate knows nothing more than they do.  He’s just following orders, and he’s ashamed of it.  When David’s group lets him go, he doesn’t rat them out to his squad.  He’s trying to do right in a messed up situation.

Though the Army is the primary threat, the crazies themselves are the real highlight.  It could easily have gone in a more traditional zombie movie approach by making the infected just mindless monsters, but it takes an extra, unsettling step.  Nearly all of the crazies David's group runs into are characters briefly but memorably introduced in the first act. They are friends and neighbors.  For the most part, decent people.  That makes it even more chilling when the high school principal suddenly shows up dragging a pitchfork behind him, systematically perforating the restrained, helpless patients housed in his own auditorium.  Or, when the funeral director starts sewing up bodies that aren’t dead yet.  Even the incidental scenes have thought put into them, like when the survivors walk by a bunch of the baseball players from the opening who are methodically pounding their fists into a steel dumpster.

This Trixie virus is a real son of a bitch.  Giving it a cute name didn’t help.  Before turning its hosts into complete psychos, it distorts and subverts their personalities.  The loving husband turns on his family.  The wife and son of the man David had to shoot at the baseball game force David to watch as they try to kill Judy.  Deputy Russell is the saddest case.  While David refuses to admit they could become infected, Rus sees his inevitable fate clearly.  “I’m no world leader, but I had plans,” he laments.  Even when the sickness starts to creep in, working on his insecurities and paranoia, making him dangerous, he keeps it together.  He still wants to do the right thing.  His last act is a little bit of conciliation, at least.  He gets to sacrifice himself to help his friends. 

Of course, when the people are assholes to begin with, watch out.  The three redneck hunters who find the crashed plane’s pilot only needed the tiniest nudge from the virus to coax them into poaching people instead of deer.  When they show up briefly in the middle, with their pickup full of trophy bodies, they are treated like T-Rex Crazies, top of the crazy food chain.  Standard crazies want to kill you, these motherfuckers want to mount you on their wall.  The giant Viking looking dude with the Mohawk could be the main villain in a slasher movie just by himself, and that is before he gets all veiny and Trixie-roided out.  As intimidating as they are, the tension of the film was so relentless that I forget about them for a while.  It was a nice (and awful) surprise when they show up at the very end, silently staring at David and Judy in what they thought was a sanctuary.    

Though the story is centered in a single town, it has a bit of an apocalyptic road movie feel, like something Stephen King would write.  It moves from one self-contained scene to the next, with just a quick breather in between the tension.  The pacing is fantastically tight—no filler, but still having room for organic character development.  The big suspense scenes are staged differently enough to stand out.  While I do enjoy a good bone saw fight, the best is probably the car wash attack.  David’s group is trapped in a car as it advances down the track as the spinning brushes, water spray, and noise hide the crazies that might be around them.  It’s like the worst funhouse ride ever.

Timothy Olyphant is a man comfortable with playing a lawman.  THE CRAZIES was in between his role as hotheaded frontier sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood and his magnificent turn as U.S. Marshall Rayland Givens in Justified.  David Dutton is more of an “aw shucks” small town constable.  He has a smile for everyone, but nothing gets by him, and he lets people know it.  Olyphant plays him with more doubt and vulnerability than with Rayland.  It’s still a bad idea to try and outdraw him, though.  Once the shit starts to go down, David struggles to keep it together.  He gets snippy and makes mistakes, but his determination to keep his wife safe pushes him through.  

Olyphant is brilliant at conveying simmering anger just under the surface.  He explodes a few times, but mostly he just plays it with a searing glance.  It is all he can do to bite his tongue when someone is yelling something obvious to him.  His expression alone shouts “I AM trying to start the fucking car!”  There are a couple of times I was surprised the crazies didn’t just back away awkwardly, trying not make eye contact.  Best just to let that guy cool off a bit.  If Olyphant got into an intense-off with Michael Shannon, the Earth would probably crack in two.

Radha Mitchell makes is a great match for him as Judy.  Though she has her fatalistic moments, she is very feisty and doesn’t let that pesky Hippocratic oath keep her from wasting some crazy bastards when need be.  I’ve been following Michell since PITCH BLACK and I haven’t been disappointed in her choices.  She has a taste for genre work, with great turns in films like SILENT HILL and ROGUE.  There is something about her big, haunted eyes that works so well for horror and sci-fi.   

This tense, tight little nail-biter came from a land seeped in remakes.  Co-writer Scott Kosar did screenplays for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE and THE AMITYVILLE HORROR remakes, so I can't explain how this one came out so well (he also did THE MACHINIST, which I liked).  Director of photography Maxime Alexandre, who composed some exquisite shots in this, did cinematography on the excellent remakes of THE HILLS HAVE EYES and MANIAC.  Director Breck Eisner, has only done two other theatrical releases, neither remakes (2005’s SAHARA and 2015’s THE LAST WITCH HUNTER), though he is currently attached to the re-remake of FRIDAY THE 13^th..  That seems like a bad idea, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt based on this one.




See, this was not a political statement at all. Only talking about movies.  There is no way I am saying a shadow government exposed the Mid-West (and beyond) to a mind altering Trumpie virus that caused millions of reasonable people to make catastrophically bad decisions.  That's just...crazy?

C Chaka