“I don’t like Dreamcatcher very much,” Stephen King said of his bestselling sci-fi horror book back in 2014. Written in longhand under the heavy influence of OxyContin, a medication that the author was taking after a car accident had left him severely injured, the book was certainly …something. Mind you, this remark about him not liking his book came more than a decade after it had already been adapted for the screen and he’d declared the movie version “one of the very, very good adaptations” of his work. Perhaps, then, we should view this as a very strange kind of compliment.

Indeed, the Dreamcatcher movie is also certainly …something. A largely faithful adaptation of King’s tome, it was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, who had previously found success writing Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Bodyguard. He co-wrote Dreamcatcher with legendary screenwriter William Goldman, and the film features a stacked cast that includes Timothy Olyphant, Morgan Freeman, Thomas Jane, and Damian Lewis. It’s no surprise that people were excited to see how it turned out.

However, there was still the actual King story to contend with, and what a story it is! We follow four lifelong friends – Jonesy, Beaver, Pete, and Henry – who share a mysterious psychic bond after saving a troubled boy named Duddits in childhood. Years later, they reunite for an annual hunting trip, only to find the area gripped by a deadly alien infection. Stumbling upon a disoriented stranger, they soon discover he’s carrying a parasitic extraterrestrial lifeform that violently bursts from the assholes of its human hosts. This “shitweasel” infection spreads rapidly, so the U.S. military quarantines the region to contain the threat.

The leader of the alien force is also revealed to be capable of possessing human bodies. It takes control of Jonesy (Lewis), using him as a host to finalize its evil plan. Jonesy battles the invader in a surreal “memory warehouse” inside his own mind, trying to regain control. Meanwhile, Henry (Jane) teams up with the adult Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg) to stop the aliens from contaminating a major water supply.

So what we have here is a lot of nonsense peppered with classic King dialogue motifs (“SSDD,” “fuck me Freddy,” “fuckarow.”) There are alien butt monsters, the U.S. military, a snowstorm, scenes set entirely in a character’s mind, and jarring Maine flashbacks that have to keep explaining who Duddits is and why his supernatural bond with the lads matters, because he’s going to come back at the end to save the day. To say all of this is messy would be an understatement, but when you know that King wrote this story while high as balls on OxyContin, I’d argue it’s all pretty easy to understand.

The movie also springs one bonkers filmmaking decision after another on us, as it should. “Sometimes you can underestimate what can be in a movie,” Kasdan told In Focus. “There were things in the book that I wanted in the movie that [Goldman] felt maybe couldn’t be in – and I sort of added them back.” He absolutely did, yes. And then some. For example, the character of Jonesy is an American, but when the alien leader, Mr Gray, possesses his body almost halfway into the movie’s runtime, it turns out that the alien has a clipped, Laurence Olivier-esque, 1930s British accent, which Lewis admits was “a kind of wild and surreal” decision, adding, “People jumped online afterwards and said, ‘Oh God, I really loved the film. But that Damian Lewis guy, what is that English accent? It’s totally unbelievable.’”

That’s right, the audience didn’t think Lewis – who is actually British – managed to pull off what was essentially his own accent. That’s how much whiplash Jonesy’s “tally ho!” handbrake turn into Mr Gray inflicts on viewers. And that’s hardly all. Jonesy’s mental memory warehouse, kept from the book, is also envisioned as a real warehouse where Lewis is seen pottering around, retrieving files full of exposition and plot twists. When we jump there, we don’t know if we’re about to see a deus ex machina or a flashback that derails the movie’s momentum. Elsewhere, Jason Lee’s performance as the somewhat underwritten Beaver is so surprisingly good that he blows everyone else off the screen. When he’s eaten alive by a toilet monster at the end of the first act, it leaves a sudden gaping hole (no pun intended) in the movie’s vibe.

Then there’s the U.S. military duo of Freeman and Tom Sizemore, who feel like they’re in a completely different movie. Dreamcatcher needs us to understand that Freeman’s Colonel Abraham Curtis is unhinged and that Sizemore’s Captain Owen Underhill is the only one who can stop him from nuking the infected site from orbit, but these roles are woefully miscast – Sizemore is not a natural straight man and Freeman seems extremely uncomfortable with the dialogue he’s been given as he rants about everything from his gun (he got it from John Wayne) to the reverence he has for American citizens “they never miss an episode of Friends,” all while trying to sell dialogue like “Bucko, I think we’re on the same page – pissing in the same latrine” with classic Freeman gravitas (he fails spectacularly.) Though Freeman said he got input on everything we see him do in Dreamcatcher, he also joked, “What if I said ‘paycheck’?” when asked what kind of genre it falls into.

We haven’t even gotten to Wahlberg’s performance as the adult version of Duddits. Here, the New Kids on the Block icon-turned-actor has the unenviable task of playing a powerful alien entity hiding inside the body of someone with a disability. Wahlberg said he prepared for the role by watching videos of kids with Down syndrome. Your mileage may vary with this one, folks, to put it mildly.

Taking all this into account, it will not shock you to learn that Dreamcatcher bombed both critically and financially. Not only that, it “wounded” Kasdan’s career considerably; it would be almost a decade before he directed another movie (the Diane Keaton-led dog rom-com, Darling Companion.)

Still, there’s something decidedly bold about Dreamcatcher that invites a reassessment, especially in the wacky, Scooby-Doo-riffing era of Welcome to Derry. You’ve got to admire (and dare I say, respect) Kasdan’s certainty that a story about a group of psychic friends dealing with an alien shitweasel invasion in the middle of a snowstorm, from the decidedly drug-fueled mind of Stephen King, would work on the big screen. I mean, it didn’t, but the movie remains massively entertaining because everyone seems to be having such a lot of fun with the deranged material. “I loved making that movie,” Lewis said, reflecting on the experience. “I loved working with Larry. It was a wild ride of a film; that script was a lot. But we had a great group of guys.”

Sometimes, that’s all you need. Sure, Dreamcatcher remains an unsubtle clusterfuck of a movie, yet at least it swings for the fences. With so many genres crammed inside it – alien invasion, body horror, psychic friendship drama, military thriller – it is absolute chaos, but that’s a feature, not a bug. And y’know what? With everything it’s got going on, at least you’re never bored.

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