Critic's Grade: D-

"Dreamcatcher" tells the story of four childhood friends, now adults (played by Thomas Jane, Damian Lewis, Timothy Olyphant, and Jason Lee), who embark on their 20th annual vacation to a cabin in the snowy woodlands of Maine. These are no ordinary men, however, as they have the ability to communicate with one another telepathically, and can peer into the minds of others (a sixth sense, so to speak). This time, however, their getaway is marked by an unforeseeable phenomenon: when animals begin feeling the forest and the area itself is put under quarantine by the government, they find themselves waging a physical and psychological war against... alien invaders??? You wanna talk about a disappointment!

There are a number of problems that arise in Lawrence Kasdan's unprecedentedly messy combination of genres, not the least of which is the surprising nosedive the material takes very early on in the picture. At first we think we're going to be watching an intriguing story about four men coming to grips with something, anything besides what the second half of the plot has in store. There is one moment in the film at which something cataclysmic occurs in the cabin's bathroom, and from this point on, the entire affair becomes a downright ludicrous monster movie that tries to be something more than the confines of the script allows for.

The manner in which Kasdan attempts to make up for this is shameful and transparent. He and co-writer William Goldman make various insertions of humor in the form of one-liners, but in effect they take away from what little tension the movie is able to develop. When Lewis's character becomes possessed by the alien and begins speaking in the voice of John Cleese, it's all downhill from there. It's not uncommon for films of this sort to have a healthy balance of laughs and scares, but "Dreamcatcher" has no idea of how to solve that equation, and thus falls flat at each ridiculous attempt. And when he's not trying to make us laugh, Kasdan makes an effort to shock us with a series of grotesque images that are surprisingly ineffective and tedious once you get past the initial jolt.

Even the inclusions of actors Morgan Freeman and Tom Sizemore is useless in adding energy to the material. Freeman plays a fanatical alien hunter who shows no remorse about the possible slaughter of people infected with an extra-terrestrial virus; Sizemore is his right-hand man who has a big heart. In the end, their only purpose is to cancel one another out, leaving the original men (or what's left of them) to finish the job and save the day.

If anything, however, "Dreamcatcher" isn't so much a bad movie as it is one that is completely uninspired and redundant. It's one thing to borrow an element or two from a genre, but this one keeps on borrowing until it can borrow no more, and then it continues still. Consider the alien being itself, which forms within a human host and then exits from the body; this is directly reminiscent of Ridley Scott's "Alien," only the parasite escapes through the buttocks rather than the chest. And how about the whole quarantine/virus issue, which stems from 1995's "Outbreak?" There's an Earth battle between aliens and humans that could seamlessly fit into the blockbuster "Independence Day," but the most apparent of rip-offs resides within a character named Douglas (played as a man by Donnie Wahlberg), or as he pronounces it, "Duddits." He provides the conduit through which the remaining character in the end comes to the realization of what is going on, something that M. Night Shyamalan already accomplished with far better results in "Signs."

But ultimately, what did (or rather didn't) push my buttons was the lack of freshness and energy to all of this hooey. There's a point at which a filmmaker must at least attempt to add some originality or inventiveness to his work, but Kasdan isn't even trying here. So who's to blame for this mess? Perhaps Stephen King, author of the source novel, without whom we never would have had the idea in the first place. Perhaps the filmmakers are ultimately at fault for choosing sensationalistic tactics over solid moviemaking. Hell, it may even be my fault; after all, the only thing I wanted was to be entertained, not grossed out by some creature feature that has no sense of purpose or direction. In the end, "Dreamcatcher" is the nightmare that its titular object of superstition is believed to capture.

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