DREAMCATCHER (2003). Stephen King sure had his head up his ass when he came up with Dreamcatcher. The excremental references start early and often in this compost heap of half-digested ideas as four young pals prevent a bunch of punks from forcing a retarded kid to eat a turd. In gratitude, the kid grants them extrasensory powers, which prove a burden and curse, much as in such other King potboilers as The Dead Zone and The Green Mile. That is, until years later, when the four are getting away from it all in a cabin in the Maine woods and they come across a lost hunter with a bad case of gas and the shit hits the fan. They've wandered into a whole new movie, or maybe several, in which invading aliens reproduce by passing through the alimentary canal: it's Alien via anus, Species with feces, They Came from Within and forgot to flush afterward. Adding to the pile are Morgan Freeman hamming it up as a colonel who's taken a Dr. Strangelove turn after "25 years of hunting down E.T.s," preposterous direction from Lawrence Kasdan (maybe he saw this as The Big Swill), and vain efforts from Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Damian Lewis, and Timothy Olyphant to look scared by the giant, phallic vagina dentata that's stalking them. Long before this turd makes its convoluted way to the end, you'll be saying, "Cut the crap." (134m)

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