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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In "Dreamcatcher,"the new big-budget horror film from Warner Bros., based on a novel by Stephen King and directed by Lawrence Kasdan, an abominable worm shows up, the kind of horror-film beast with more teeth than William F. Buckley and an infinite ability to commit mayhem and then reproduce itself. About three feet long, tubular and slithering, the creature enters people's bodies and tears through their guts, or it attacks them from outside, grabbing at their faces, necks, and genitals. All in all, it's not a bad worm, but, of course, we've seen it before. For more than twenty years, we've been seeing it--sometimes as something large and scaly, rearing up and exhaling unspeakable fumes, sometimes in the shape of a chattering mini-dinosaur or an exacerbated gargoyle. "Dreamcatcher"features a lot of snow and four male friends in their thirties, who are held together by a special secret. The snow is pretty, and there's some warmth among the men--a long experience of jokes and banter--but still, 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. A critic has to ask himself why he's sitting there watching it. He feels embedded in junk.
Anyone who...
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