Maybe Sleep Inducer would have been a better name

Tonight as I'm working, one of the myriad HBO channels is running a dreadful bit of cinematic business entitled Dreamcatcher. It's one of those films that's so embarrassingly executed in every conceivable way that I feel sorry for everyone involved with it, while simultaneously wishing I could smack each one of them alongside the head for perpetrating such a foul excuse for a movie, and wasting valuable time and resources in doing so.

Apparently, this stupefying picture is based on a novel by Stephen King, which pretty well explains its awfulness. I haven't attempted to inflict one of Mr. King's bloated masterworks on myself since high school — the experience of trudging through Salem's Lot was sufficient to turn me off to the author's product forever. Since, however, the Maine Maniac continues to churn out these potboilers, and his legions of fans (many of whom, I'm convinced, wouldn't recognize real literature if it landed in their laps) continue to buy them by the truckload, there must be some marginal entertainment value in them somewhere. "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people," as H.L. Mencken observed.

But if I were Mr. King, I'd stop letting people attempt to make movies out of my writings, at least the allegedly scary ones. (I'll give him The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.) Either that portion of the King oeuvre is as terrible as I remember Salem's Lot being — in which case even the greatest of filmmakers couldn't turn excrement into excellence — or the horror stuff simply doesn't translate to celluloid. (Exhibit A: Rose Red.) Whatever the scenario, it's time for Steve to just say no to Hollywood. (Or at least everyone in Hollywood except Frank Darabont.)

I won't give you a detailed review of Dreamcatcher here, other than to say, "Avoid it like you'd avoid rancid meat." But it does raise a question that has bugged me in several other pictures from which this one has liberally plagiarized, including Alien and its sequels (one of the characters in Dreamcatcher shares his name with Sigourney Weaver's cat in the original film — if you're going to steal, at least try to subtle about it), John Carpenter's grisly remake of The Thing, and the various iterations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Here it is: If alien monsters from outer space require human hosts in which to breed and thrive, what did they do before they found us? How would a creature like that exist in the absence of human beings? And assuming they survived long enough to (a) recognize that we were essential to their existence, and (b) develop the complex technology necessary for interstellar space travel, how did they know where to find us?