The 2000s Stephen King Horror Movie That Was Unintentionally Funny
When you're best-selling author Stephen King, and there have been dozens of film and television adaptations of your work, there are bound to be hits and some serious misses too. This includes brilliant successes like "Misery" and "Carrie," as well as misfires such as "Maximum Overdrive," which King himself directed.
Ultimately, the best King films are those where the premise lends itself well to a movie. "The Dead Zone" works not just because of the care David Cronenberg took in adapting the novel, but also because the plot, which involves a psychic whose touch lets him see into the future, can always be compelling. But when King's very specific tone and prose, especially as a writer of New England lingo, gets translated awkwardly, the result can seem downright ridiculous.
This film version of a 2001 King novel especially didn't connect with audiences, and the summary when read out loud seems like a terrible choice to approach as dramatic material. Here's more about the 2003 horror film that accidentally sparked laughs instead of scares with audiences.
Dreamcatcher was a flop with critics and viewers alike
Like the novel, the film "Dreamcatcher", directed by Lawrence Kasdan, tells the story of four childhood friends gifted with telepathic abilities who have to deal with an invasion of parasitic aliens. It sounds simple enough at first glance.
But the aliens bring in a rather scatological plot point: when they emerge from the humans, they're excreted out, meaning that at one point, a three-foot monster actually appears in the toilet. It's just too silly a plot point for a movie with a high body count that's trying to keep things scary and tense.
Critics rather understandably couldn't take the movie seriously, as it currently has a 28% Tomatometer and 35% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It also ended up being a flop with audiences, as noted in the film's Box Office Mojo page. That may not be the fault of the filmmakers either: in a 2014 interview, King acknowledged that the "Dreamcatcher" novel itself wasn't very good, as it was the first book he'd taken on after being hit by a car. Luckily, he's written plenty of good ones in the years since.