altariel | Dreamcatcher

Fantastically scathing review of Dreamcatcher in Thursday's Evening Standard, reproduced here for your reading pleasure (spoilers, obviously). Thanks to Steve for scanning it and sending it over to me.

Stephen King hits rock bottom

"No way is there going to be a worse film than Dreamcatcher this side of midsummer. It's as if Stephen King - for he is the origin of this stupefying SF horror - sold off a job lot of plots that he couldn't fit rationally together, and William Goldman and Lawrence Kasdan, respectively screenwriter and director (may God forgive them), hammered them into the shapeless, incoherent, bloody awful swill they have brazenly put their names to.

Look herein, if you have money to waste before the video trap closes on it, and you will see: a) a going-nowhere plot about four buddies who have befriended a feeble-minded kid and been endowed with telepathic powers; b) a stranger who stumbles flatulently into their holiday cabin in the woods and almost immediately gives birth to a many-toothed homicidal worm out of his arse while sitting on the loo; c) a mad American general (I shall show him no mercy, but name Morgan Freeman) who goes rogue, hijacks a helicopter and starts shooting up his own men sent to cordon off the mutation invasion of fanged turds.

None of this crap makes even as much superficial sense as my brilliant precise suggests. It is worse than an incompetent fiasco: it as a contemptuous one, too.

The public will stand anything, is the message, if the right names are connected with it and a bundle of praiseworthy opinions culled from the quote-whores of the printed media.

I don't think I have exposed myself to that risk."

Can't wait to see it.