Plop Goes the Weasel
No description does the jaw-dropping Dreamcatcher justice
You’re sitting on a toilet lid with a razor-toothed monster growling underneath, and you suddenly spill your favorite toothpicks on a crud-streaked bathroom floor. One toothpick lands crud-free, just out of reach. What do you do? If you say screw the toothpick and clamp your butt down until someone brings one big-ass cake of Ty-D-Bol, then you’ve got good sense. If you think, “Hey, I can reach that,” then you’re in Dreamcatcher, and good sense was never an option.
Not that it matters much: The full-tilt imbecility of Dreamcatcher has a crazy verve that “good” movies of the moment can’t match. No timid, tasteful drama is going to hinge upon bugaboos called “shit weasels,” omnisexual outer-space eels that erupt from their victims’ bowels to terrorize the Maine woods. Nobody will win an Oscar for playing a psychic named Beaver, or an autistic mystic whose battle cry is the Scooby-Doo theme song. Dreamcatcher’s go-for-broke lunacy is its own reward.
Like its closest kin, the sci-fi invasion thrillers of the 1950s, Dreamcatcher is a time capsule of period-specific taboos and terrors—starting with the shit weasels and all their icky-kinky connotations, then continuing to an America under quarantine, where the madmen in charge form an equally scary threat-from-within. The movie can get away with critiquing the war on terrorism, in the tradition of many an anti-nuke giant-insect flick, because it is absolutely nuts.
Dreamcatcher was adapted by director Lawrence Kasdan and screenwriter William Goldman from a Stephen King novel, and it’s the rare King translation in which the author’s voice can still be heard above the director’s. Granted, that pungent patois of obscure curses, brand names and sui generis slang is as hard to camouflage as limburger. But for all the stinky dialogue and absurd plotting, Kasdan deserves credit for pursuing King’s yarn to its extremes. Some of the actors even seem liberated by its mania—especially Morgan Freeman, who barely hides his amusement playing a crackpot alien hunter. When a bad movie offers as much unhinged pleasure as Dreamcatcher, can it really be called bad?
—Jim Ridley
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