When four young boys save a mentally handicapped kid from being humiliated by local bullies, they receive strange abilities from him. Twenty years later, the friends are taking a trip to a remote log cabin, where they find a monstrous disease spreading through the woods.

We begin as four friends, engrossed in their mundane day to day jobs, are making arrangements for their yearly winter trip to a log cabin. We quickly cut to events many years earlier. As kids, the four of them set off on a typical childhood adventure when they come across a bunch of local bullies picking on a mentally handicapped kid. The boys decide they can't just walk away as the kid is tortured, and they manage to retrieve the boy from his captors, and quickly befriend him.

As the kids spend time with 'Duddits', played by Donnie Wahlberg, they find that he has supernatural powers, which, during one of their adventures, he transfers to the four boys. They all take treat their new found abilities as just another adventure, and don't really give them much thought, and as we cut back in the present, Pete, played by Timothy Olyphant, is using his skills to try and pick up an attractive lady who asked for his help, but managing only to freak her out, ensuring she wants nothing to do with him at all.

As the guys are settling in for their weekend of drinking and hunting, 'Jonesy', played by Damian Lewis finds a guy, suffering terribly from frostbite, who has been lost in the woods. Jonesy takes him back to the empty cabin to defrost, and discovers that the stranger has the most uncontrollable and unpleasant wind problem. 'Beaver', played by Jason Lee, returns to the cabin, and despite the nasty aroma, the two of them pack the stranger off to bed to get some rest.

However, later on they find that the stranger has been bleeding heavily, and when they break down the bathroom door, they find the bathroom covered in blood, the stranger dead and with an unnaturally large hole in his behind. Beaver and Jonesy quickly discover that this oversized hole was created by a creature now hiding in the loo, and in a moment of genius, Beaver decides that the best course of action is to sit on the loo and trap it. Jonesy heads off to get some tape to trap the creature more permanently, but returns to discover that he is too late, and Beaver is dead.

At this point in the movie it seems that the tone has been set, and the remains of the movie will be a typical low budget, small cast, gore-fest battle between man and beast. However, things quickly take a major shift in direction when out of the blue an army helicopter flies over, containing Col. Abraham Curtis, played by Morgan Freeman, declaring that the whole area is now under a quarantine restriction. Things feels very disjoined at this point, with a new bigger budget feel, which just doesn't seem to fit with the earlier stages of the movie. The end result feels like two almost unrelated movies thrust together. It is extremely hard to tell what Lawrence Kasdan the director was trying to achieve, but I think its safe to say he doesn't pull it off.

Dreamcatcher is based on the Stephen King Novel of the same name. The early stages of this film feel a lot like IT, as we flick between the guys childhood adventures and the present day. However, the second half of the film is really rather bizarre and disappointing. It is worth noting that the movie is very loyal to the first half of King's book, before veering off somewhat. The films demise is all the more strange as the downturn coincides with the arrival of such a great actor as Morgan Freeman, in what is surely one of the poorest roles he has undertaken. It really feels like a B-movie that someone high up has completely ruined by insisting on throwing some cash at the project half way through, and demanding that he can see where the money went.

King has stated that there where two motivations for the book, and so the film. The first was his desire to tell a story about normal guys just interacting as guys do, which he really only does for the first few minutes of the film. His second motivation was to attack what he saw as an unbroken taboo in the movie world, that of the bathroom. He admitted that the whole point of the story was to build up to the moment in the movie when the stranger falls from the toilet, revealing his huge, gaping, bloody, arsehole. Nice!

King's books very often haven't been made into great movies, or even good movies, but Dreamcatcher still manages to be pretty disappointing. It is severely let down by its second half, and leaves the viewer questioning exactly who this film is aimed at. As such, it is hard to see which movie viewers to recommend this to. There is perhaps just sufficient gore to partly satisfy a gore fan, but so much of the movie is about other things. Ultimately, I don't think many viewers will get much out of seeing this film, and most will be confused and disappointed with its disjointed halves.

Mark: 3/10
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