Dreamkatcher & Devil’s Workshop



So my mom is a big Outlander fan. Mainly of the books, but she does like the show too. But not enough to constantly have Starz on tap. But she got it for a month to watch the newest season of the show…and then got through everything in a couple of days and couldn’t find anything else to watch. So for the sake of not letting her good money go to waste, I swiped her log-in (okay, she gave it to me) and tried to find some stuff to watch myself. Truth be told, they honestly don’t have much on there that I’m all that interested in either. Their horror section in particular, leaves much to be desired. But I did find a couple fun action movies to watch, and I finally saw Silent Night, and finished off Ash vs. Evil Dead. So all’s well that ends well, and all that. And while I say their horror section was lacking, I still ended up watching a good chunk of it and… I can’t say that I was all that impressed with most of it. But I thought I’d at least bring these two films to everyone’s attention. Not because they were good or even because of Radha Mitchell (I’m not sure if her involvement in both is either merely a coincidence or a sign of bad taste), but more as a forewarning.

First up:



DREAKKATCHER
(not to be confused with the 2003 film Dreamcatcher, based on the story by Stephen King)

Summary: A man and his new girlfriend take his son to a remote cabin in the middle of the woods to spend some quality time together and try to bond. But he ditches them mere hours into the trip because of work, leaving the woman to deal with his antagonistic and disinterested son, who is still clearly traumatized over the sudden, “accidental” death of his mother. Only – SURPRISE! – her death wasn’t accidental at all, and weird supernatural things start happening almost immediately, and yes, a dreamcatcher is involved.

In One Word: *yawn*

Extended Thoughts: On the technical side, this is very nice. Looks good. Sounds good. Great atmosphere and good acting. So all that good jazz. Yay rah, yay rah.

It’s everything else that kinda sucks. The characters? Annoying. Or at least the ones you spend the most time with are. The kid’s character is just obnoxious, so you can add him to the list of “annoying kids in horror movies”. The father is not only perpetually in denial of his son’s trauma regarding his mother, but also actively does things to exacerbate it like bringing the kid to the cabin his mother tragically died at. WTF, dude?! The girlfriend fares a little bit better, because she’s a child psychologist and actually trying to be decent, but even I was rolling my eyes by the end with her stringent “that is superstition and I am a woman of SCIENCE!” routine. The only one who maintains at least some semblance of sanity is, ironically, the town crazy lady, and that’s only because she’s dealing with her own trauma by self-isolating, drinking and injecting copious amounts of sarcasm into her conversations, like any other normal fucking human being. But then again she’s played by Lin Shayne, who seems pretty down to earth in general, so maybe that helps. But with everyone else I was getting pretty tired of watching them after the first 5 minutes.





The real problem with this one though, is the story. Because this is really just another one of your standard “supernatural object torments family” type of horror movies. Doesn’t matter what the object is. Dreamcatcher, book, box, doll, creepy cymbal playing monkey… Once you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all, and this film is no different. Family under strain tries to get away for a while, one of them finds something ominous, weird stuff happens, people in denial, more strain, only the town weirdo knows what’s really going on – they’re ignored – more and more bad things happen until ultimately… Tragedy! It’s all very cookie-cutter and thus very predictable.


Oh look…a ghost…yay…

And I might be able to overlook most of that if the ending were at least fun. But it’s not. It commits the cardinal sin of horror movies, by not only making everyone turn stupid by the end, but also by leaving the ending ambiguous. And by ambiguous, I mean that I honestly don’t know what the hell happened at the end. Like – and these are some serious spoilers – the poor girlfriend is tied up with the kid standing over her with a knife, ready to get all stabby-stabby on her and then… the screen goes black, and suddenly she’s running through the woods with the “dreamkatcher”, frantically trying to bury it (under, like, 2 inches of leaves? Give me a break, lady…), and the kid is just casually walking down the road covered in blood. Just, WTF movie? You cut out THAT part? I mean, yes, I can infer that she somehow got away, or he let her go, but seriously? You cut out the actual climax of the film’s climax?!? I can’t tell if that’s lazy story writing or if it was due to lousy budget constraints, but either way…BOOOO, YOU SUCK!



So no, don’t watch this one. It looks pretty, but it’s boring, routine, and has no payoff.

And speaking of lack of payoff….

The Devil’s Workshop

Summary: A struggling actor finally gets a callback to a role he’s really excited about: playing a demonologist. Only problem is, he has no idea what a demonologist is or what they do. And there’s this pompous douchebag in his acting class who’s up for the same role and he DOES NOT want to be upstaged by this idiot. So the weekend before the callback he goes out to the countryside to visit Eliza, a purported demonologist and expert, so that he can do some research on the part. But things…don’t go as planned.

In One Word: … What?

Extended Thoughts: Oh man, I had trouble figuring out the ending to Dreamkatcher, but with this one I’m struggling to figure out what the movie was even trying to say. Cause it’s clear it’s trying to say something, but I must be a dumb-dumb, cause I just could not figure out what they were aiming for. Maybe something about the dangers of jealousy or desperation? Because as we all know, horror movies aren’t allowed to be horror movies anymore, they have to be some roundabout way of making some deep social commentary too. But I swear this one went about it all weird, because at no point did it feel like any of the people were acting normally.



It starts out easily enough, with a down-on-his-luck kid trying to better prepare himself for something he really wants. And you can tell he’s struggling and going through the motions, and so far I’m following along just fine. But then he actually gets to Eliza’s house, and things start to get weird. Like, weird-weird. And I get that they were going for the “let’s make the audience as uncomfortable as possible” type of horror movies, but seriously, after Eliza’s 3rd or 4th unnaturally invasive question, or inappropriate comment, anyone else would have, you know, left. Probably after calling her several expletives on their way out. And I mean, the kid didn’t have to be there. He wasn’t trapped. There were plenty of opportunities before shit went down to leave. And very little of what she was discussing actually connected back to demonology in any way, so I’m still not sure why he stayed. It felt more like he was being subjected to a creepy self-help therapy session with a new age hippy then studying for a part. I fail to see how he thought any of that was helping him. He could have gone to the damn library and read a book and gotten better information than what she was giving him, and unless the book check out process has changed since the last time I visited he wouldn’t have had to go into the trauma of his mother’s death in order to do it. Add in other random scenes of his douche-bag rival being a…well, douche-bag, and they’re just the sprinkles on the already confusing Devil cake.


TF does this have to do about learning demonology?

The real kicker though, is the ending. Because like Dreamkatcher, you get no payoff. But in this case it’s worse, because you actually do get a FULL ending, it’s just that it falls completely flat and you’re left thinking, “….that’s it?” by the end of it all. The story threads revolving around the parallels about the actor and his rival, the question of whether or not demons are real or if our actor friend is just having some kind of fucked up dream, the main character’s backstory…you get nothing from it. No clarity on the backstory, no hint on whether or not it’s real, and no ultimate face-off with the rival. So no answers, no conclusion. Nada. The movie just ends in bad CGI fire, and you’re left wondering what the point was.



Because I know there was a point and a message, and I don’t mind movies that have that. Hell, I don’t even care if I agree with it or not. But I’d like it to at least be clear enough for me to know what it is. Kinda like Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. A lot of people had issues with those movies because of the underlying themes the director was trying to convey. But even if I didn’t necessarily agree with what was being said or how it was conveyed, at least the implications of the message were clear enough that I could see where they were going with it. But here… I just don’t know. It feels more like a string of mundane activities and randomly awkward scenes strung together with trauma and blood, and then a demon shows up and pulls its face off and suddenly everything’s on fire, and it turns out the rival the actor was so worried about actually sucks and then the film just… Ends. So, sorry movie, but I’m completely baffled by your message. Which is a shame, because aesthetically the movie is lovely (minus the bad CGI fire, anyway…) and it is very well acted. It’s just that the story is so ambiguous that…. Well, I think it really bites. Sorry.



So there’s my rundown of Dreamkatcher and Devil’s Workshop, two technically sound films that aren’t going to be all that impressive to you if you’re at all interested in the story. In fact, they’ll likely be quite boring to most of you. So consider this your forewarning to skip these. Unless you’re just into the movie watching for the visuals, which in fairness are very nice in both films. So if that’s what you like, then by all means have at it…. But seriously, you shouldn’t, because this is sincerely one of those “I did it so you don’t have to” moments.

Just to clarify though, none of this is a dig at Radha Mitchell. She’s actually very good in both films. It’s just that she just so happened to be in both films, so I put her in the title.

Dreamkatcher and Devil’s Workshop are both available on a variety of streaming services.

Dreamkatcher and Devil’s Workshop are also both available on DVD and Bluray.

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