Dreamcatcher

Washington Post Desson Thomson

I think you can say that almost everyone watching this will be spellbound, whether they're stupefied by its insanity, more conventionally compelled by the various horrors in store or a combination of both.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Dreamcatcher is a lark probably best enjoyed by 12-year-olds -- or anyone still able to get in touch with their inner 12-year-old.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

A crazed symphony of the supernatural. The elements don't hang together, but Kasdan delivers real scares, and real hoots, in the midst of the mayhem and madness.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

Most novels can't be encapsulated well enough in a conventional two-hour movie format, and Dreamcatcher may be one of them -- a miniseries gone wrong.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Stephen Cole

Like nightmares, horror movies pull us down with them. And so the film keeps us in thrall for every one of its 134 minutes.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

The longer it takes for the eldritch glop to hit the fan, in fact, the less true the movie may be to King. For better and for worse, Dreamcatcher is true to King.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

If Dreamcatcher ultimately feels like an unwieldy pastiche, at least it's never boring.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Mildly entertaining for a while; think "Stand by Me" meets "Alien," with a soupçon of "Starship Troopers" tossed in.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Too bad Dreamcatcher amounts to a pastiche of better films like the original "The Thing" and both versions of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." It ransacks the audience's memory warehouse.

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Then the aliens show up, chased by Morgan Freeman as a nut-job Army colonel, and the movie degenerates into a sorry, silly, gory, punishingly overlong creature feature.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

It would take a filmmaker of truly astonishing versatility to harmonize all these disparate tones...But there are moments in Dreamcatcher when Kasdan gives you the giggles and the creeps at the same time, and that’s not easy to do.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Simultaneously jokey and scary, sentimental and ruthless, tediously everyday and grotesquely out of the ordinary.

Dallas Observer Andy Klein

Condensing, paring and shorthanding the story elements can be daunting, and, despite the efforts of Kasdan and Goldman, two masters at wrangling unwieldy source material into shape, there is some awkwardness and confusion in the result.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

All in all -- well, there is no all in all. There are just parts. Some fit, some don't. Some are cool, some aren't. It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

It falls back on straightforward horror tactics, executed competently but without flair. It takes liberties with the second half of the book, including one big change that will leave fans of the novel growling with disbelief and disapproval.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

The nightmare is that the live guys in this Dreamcatcher lose the battle the minute the mechanical worm turns.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

An uneasy mix that's too long, too confusing and too undramatically paced to be consistently gripping, and so blatantly panders to teenagers.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

A pretty good example of how the studios have taken over the junk that used to be left to the exploitation hacks. The hacks here have millions to work with and the end result isn't nearly as much fun as a cheap, gross horror movie can be.

Time Richard Corliss

Kasdan has been a serious filmmaker, so he gives the goofiness a smart look and some pertinent metaphors about Americans wrongfully detained. But the aim is no higher than the impulse of old schlockmeisters like Roger Corman and Ed Wood: to get the audience to scream.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Sprawling, gooey and profoundly juvenile, this derivative thriller piles on the cheese: aliens, male bonding, psychoanalytic gobbledygook, childhood secrets, military black ops, gross-out special effects, explosions, bodily function humor and a retarded boy with special powers.

Film Threat David Grove

A really illogical and silly movie.

Film Threat Kevin Carr

Much of Dreamcatcher just doesn’t make sense.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Isn't worth the time, money, or effort. For Stephen King aficionados, it's just the latest cinematic nightmare.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

How could director Lawrence Kasdan and writer William Goldman be responsible for a film that goes so awesomely wrong?

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Dreamcatcher has no business being this bad.

Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan

So often out of control that it becomes absurd and exasperating.

Slate David Edelstein

It's a mystery how such a hodgepodge, at once incoherent and overfamiliar, could have come together on screen.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Both character and metaphor have gone to the dogs, leaving a slew of fart and burp jokes and laying bare Dreamcatcher's driving purpose, which is to make multiplexes full of little boys yuk it up, then gross them out, creep them out.

Variety David Rooney

Overlong and unwieldy grab-bag of vintage monster-movie elements starts intriguingly as a snowbound deep-woods chiller, but gradually dissolves into a mess of other-worldly invasion and military counter-offensive.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

This horror-free horror flick sent me wandering through my own memory warehouse, where, at every turn, I bumped into images from similar -- and mostly superior -- entertainments.

USA Today Claudia Puig

A moviegoer's nightmare. The story is incoherent, inane and interminable.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Could hardly be called a success -- it's rather a likable disaster.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

For most of the running time I was mainly confused, as well as mildly nauseated by the gross-out details of a tale that tends to be more slimy than scary.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

Perhaps due to the talent of everyone involved, Dreamcatcher moves with an oddly exhilarating awfulness that sets it apart from more run-of-the-mill horror films, which lack the imagination and budget to be so thoroughly misconceived.

Village Voice Laura Sinagra

If hopeless literalist Kasdan could have decided on a tone this could have been a gynophobe's "Independence Day."

The New Yorker David Denby

In the end, Dreamcatcher is an abominable-worm picture. The movie is also an unholy mess, a miserably organized and redundant collection of arbitrary scares and thrills without a unifying visual or poetic idea. [31 March 2003, p. 106]

The New York Times Dana Stevens

As five or six bad movies squished together, it almost seems like a bargain.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

So much is going on, and so many bizarre and seemingly random subplots collide in Dreamcatcher, that the film feels like some crazy patchwork quilt sewn by a schizophrenic seamstress. It’s not only confusing, but dull, as well.