Book to Film Review: Dreamcatcher

About the film

Dreamcatcher was released in 2003 and is based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. It is rated 15 due to strong violence, language, horror and sexual references and is 128 minutes long.

Plot

Four childhood friends, Pete, Beaver, Henry and Jonesy share a very special gift after saving another boy, 'Duddits', from bullies when they were younger. The four men are on their annual hunting trip when a big storm hits the area.

Jonesy and Beaver come across a very ill man, Nick, while out in the woods and decide to let him come back to the cabin to rest but leave him there to go and see why there are helicopters flying overhead. When they return to the cabin, they find Nick dead in the bathroom and the walls are covered with some weird red stuff. Nick was possessed by an alien that left his body once it died and the four friends realise the storm brought in something much worse than just bad weather and they must use their special gift to try and stay alive.

What I thought

I'll start by saying that I haven't read the book so I have nothing to compare this to so if there is anything missing/ changed then I can't comment on that.

To begin with, I thought the story looked like it was going to be pretty good and until about half way in, it was, then things just got silly. After watching this for a second time, I'm thinking the book is bound to be better and I should probably read it. I loved IT and The Shining which were genuinely scary films and that is where this one fails.

There is quite a lot of suspense during the first half of the film but as I said, after that it got kind of silly and ruined everything. The aliens aren't very believable and neither was the ending. Maybe if the aliens had been better designed then I would have found them scary but they were very 'been done before' and boring.

Morgan Freeman has been amazing in pretty much everything I've seen him in so far...until this film. His character should have been someone really important with a big presence on screen but I thought he was out shined a couple of the other main actors.

Damian Lewis who played Jonesy was my favourite character. While this is a horror film, Lewis managed to add a little and much needed, humour to his role with his split personality character and broke the film up a bit for me. Even though I liked him, I have to mention that he was terrible at using a fake English accent. That was my only downside to him.

The rest of the cast weren't all that great and their performances weren't very memorable apart from Jason Lee plays Beaver. He has been amazing in Kevin Smith films and My Name is Earl but he was a big let-down in Dreamcatcher. Not the best reason to be memorable now is it?

Dreamcatcher the book was a best seller but unfortunately, this film wasn't. If you are easily scared then it might be for you, but as a die-hard horror fan, I wasn't impressed and wouldn't recommend it.