Dreamcatcher (2003): D

This is a movie based on a Stephen King novel, so you already know it has about a 75% chance of sucking pretty bad ass. Guess what? It doesn’t beat the odds. Dreamcatcher was a fucking nightmare in which several talented actors are trapped in a convoluted mash-up of old Stephen King ideas, PG13 action movie cliches, and CGI aliens that crawl out of rectums.

Some childhood friends get together for a snowy weekend of male bonding in a secluded cabin. No rectums involved yet, but just you wait! It is slowly revealed to the audience that the buddies share a telepathic bond.

The testosterone and wasted movie minutes really start to flow and then some stranger covered in a weird fungus shows up and dies, really bumming everyone out. Even worse, a worm-like alien organism slithers out of the corpse’s butthole and starts killing the friends. The butthole alien, which resembles a three foot long hookworm with rows of shark teeth, kills Jason Lee and some other guy and then lays eggs / farts fungus all over the cabin. For a few minutes, it is trapped in a toilet, which I guess is supposed to be ironic because it came out of some dude’s asshole. How clever!  Luckily, the cabin gets burned down later, cooking the alien/fungus/larva to death and saving dozens of human buttholes from future shredding and saving the movie from something possibly exciting happening.

Then some larger alien calling himself “Mr. Grey” possesses the body of Sgt. Brody from Homeland, who narrowly avoided being slaughtered by the anal eel back at the cabin. Mr. Grey wants to contaminate the water supply in Boston with worms and have a big sphincter-shredding party. Sounds good to me at this point because so far, not much has happened.

As Brody’s Mr. Grey-controlled body treks to Boston, Brody has an internal struggle with the alien in a metaphorical mental “library” that houses all of Brody’s memories. Mr. Grey is rummaging around in Brody’s head looking for a specific memory. You find out later what it is. It has nothing to do with buttholes. Or dreamcatchers.

The military gets involved, some people get infected with the fungus and get “quarantined.” Many of the infected are exterminated because this secret branch of the military is familiar with the fungus which matures into the angry butthole worm. “Angry Butthole Worm” would be a pretty cool band name, by the way.

Come to find out, one of the friends was secretly an alien… a good alien disguised as an autistic dude! Not some cavity eel that sprays moss everywhere and bites people. We learn that Mr. Grey was looking for the memories associated with this benevolent alien friend, who also gave everyone their telepathic powers. At the last minute, good alien reveals himself, battles Mr. Grey at the reservoir, and stops the water supply / butthole murder plan. The CGI fight scene thankfully lasts just a few seconds.

If you were already at the end of your rope with this messy shit, sorry: The product of the CGI alien fight is a big CGI explosion that looks like a dreamcatcher and there’s no more butthole stuff.

The fraternal childhood bond, flashbacks, and subversive alien plot remind me of It, Tommyknockers, and Stand By Me. The direction was nothing special and all of the worms look like that really liquidy CGI from the late 90’s.