Yes, and yes! Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher. What a terrible movie that I can’t quite expunge from the ol’ memory banks.
In one early scene, there’s a forestful of cute woodland creatures scampering past some of our heroes. The effects are unconvincing.
- a famously respected actor playing a military role
The august Morgan Freeman plays a helicopter rifle guy Colonel who can intern a large number of American citizens – and does!
- a famously respected screenwriter’s last adaptation and published script
Yep, as you note, that was the great William Goldman, who had previously adapted Stephen King’s Misery, and had done script doctoring work on other King movies like Hearts In Atlantis. He worked with writer/director Larry Kasdan.
- a moderately respected skateboarder/actor not quite playing himself/his other roles
Jason Lee, as BennyProfane correctly reasoned. This was a few years before he played Earl on my Name Is Earl. I liked the guy, but thought it was hilarious that Roger Ebert didn’t catch that Jason Lee was playing two different characters in “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”.
And this is why as many people saw this in the theater as we did. Before Dreamcatcher started, the studio put an animated short in front of it. It was a few months before the first Matrix sequel came out, and the nerd world hungered for more Matrixy content. And so we were dutifully impressed with “The Final Flight of the Osiris”, which was later collected into the Animatrix.
It was just like putting the Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace trailer in front of the Wing Commander movie. People would buy a movie ticket just for that, and maybe they’d stick around afterwards for the crappy movie.
- intense gastrointestinal distress
Dreamcatcher put a unique twist on alien invasions, where the aliens’ life cycle included getting painfully pooped out of a human host. The dinner scene in Alien was gross, but at least you could have a good meal while you were watching your friend die. These shitweasels, as Stephen King coined them, grew up to be the Gray-like aliens that were popular in abduction fiction at the time, except they could also possess people like ghosts and they could also chomp people up with massive jaws. They could only be stopped by military weapons, a foot, and Donny Wahlburg. Donny, of course, played a “simple” (the dialogue probably dropped the R-word) child who also had telekinetic and telepathic powers back in the IT-like flashback to the protagonists’ halcyon childhood days and then grew up to be riddled with leukemia and also turned out to be a nicer alien. That old story.
It had all the elements of being a good movie. Unfortunately, they used all of those elements.
You’re up, @KWhit!
