Dreamcatcher: Critic Reviews

Kasdan can create scenes of banter and menace, of everyday Maine community and gut-gushing F/X, but he can't wrestle this production into a coherent movie experience.

Everything here is so clumsily handled that the creepy sensation of dread that infuses the early moments is quickly washed away on a tide of space slime and wearying exposition.

Though the tale, adapted from Stephen King's best-selling novel, starts out with an eerie sense of foreboding, Dreamcatcher fails to deliver thrills and chills.

It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

Dreamcatcher is a spectacular mistake, a five-star screw-up that -- notwithstanding sheer grossness, plot meanderings, inconsistency and illogic -- has given me more fun than almost any other movie this year.

All that keeps it from trash greatness is handful of miscast players and a habit of stuffing five plot points into a space normally reserved for one.

If hopeless literalist Kasdan could have decided on a tone ... this could have been a gynophobe's Independence Day.

Even those who have read King's hybrid of horror and sci-fi may be left in the lurch. The story flowed on the book's 620 pages. It drunkenly stumbles on the screen.

The film falls apart under the strain of too many plots, too many characters and too many eels.

A bumpy thrill ride.

Dreamcatcher begins as the intriguing story of friends who share a telepathic gift, and ends as a monster movie of stunning awfulness.

It's the kind of story that probably would have worked better as a four-hour miniseries.

The elements don't hang together, but Kasdan delivers real scares, and real hoots, in the midst of the mayhem and madness.

Dreamcatcher is a serviceable action-horror-sci-fi flick much of the time, but it has a bit too much going on for any of it to have real impact.

Stupid, sophomoric and moronically silly, it leaves you with the feeling that you might welcome shock treatment just to get your brain back.

This overlong and unwieldy grab-bag of vintage monster-movie elements starts intriguingly as a snowbound deep-woods chiller, but gradually dissolves into a mess of other-worldly invasion and military counter-offensive.

One of the more consistently entertaining Stephen King adaptations.

Flamboyant and, at times, extremely repulsive.

Easily one of the most absurdly over-plotted and incoherently condensed horror movies of recent times.

Like nightmares, horror movies pull us down with them. And so the film keeps us in thrall for every one of its 134 minutes.

While the movie is fairly unpleasant it's also, finally, so ludicrous that you begin to wonder if it isn't all a big put-on.

King is dreamily free-associating, which doesn't mean he's plumbing his unconscious in search of new nightmare archetypes; it means he's recycling bits of old horror and sci-fi flicks and even setups from his own novels.

Dreamcatcher isn't worth the time, money, or effort.