Dreamcatcher (2003)

Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Starring Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis, Morgan Freeman, Timothy Olyphant, Jason Lee, Tom Sizemore, Eric Keenleyside, Giacomo Baessato, Mikey Holekamo, Reece Thompson, Joel Palmer, Donnie Wahlberg. [R]

Four friends with telepathic abilities travel to a cabin in the snowy woods where they encounter a monstrous presence, and I’m not talking about Morgan Freeman’s eyebrows. But don’t expect a slimy parasitic monster movie with an extrasensory twist, because this incomprehensible movie keeps altering its own makeup with absurd developments, jarring shifts in subject and tone, and new “layers upon layers” to its supernatural hokum (memory warehouses, shared dream visions, swirling psychic tracing, etc.). As for Freeman and those insubordinate eyebrows, he’s an unhinged Army colonel leading the aggressive defense against an alien invasion, and he spouts consistently inane dialogue throughout that verge on straight-faced parody (“Those poor helpless little fools, all naked and unarmed besides their crashed intergalactic Winnebago”); his name is Curtis, by the way, not Kurtz, but, hey, something had to be transparent in this ungainly mishmash…besides Down’s Syndrome = magic (oof). Never trust a movie that refers to its slippery extraterrestrial menace as “sh– weasels” and still expects to be taken seriously. Scripted by director Kasdan and William Goldman (quite possibly the film career nadirs for both), and based on the same-named novel that Stephen King wrote while under the influence of Oxycontin after a car wreck…so that sort of explains it.

15/100