I haven't read the Stephen King novel on which it's based, but I can say that Dreamcatcher, the movie, is an overly ambitious story of what happens when a group of vacationing buddies inadvertently stumble upon a deadly alien invasion and government cover-up. It plays like a sloppy cut and paste job that's derivative of many films without reaching the heights of any.

With a team like co-writer William Goldman and director Lawrence Kasdan at the helm, the expectation bar is set pretty high. But Dreamcatcher won't go down as a bright spot on the resume of either. From a screenplay perspective, it's a muddled, overwrought mess. On a directorial level, Kasdan has been unable to weave the many plot threads into anything coherent, which he's proven adept at doing in complex character films like The Big Chill and Grand Canyon.

There are several loosely connected stories going on here. First, there's the story of four vacationing childhood buddies (Thomas Jane, Jason Lee, Timothy Olyphant and Damian Lewis) who share a psychic gift, given to them in childhood by a strange, autistic or possibly brain-damaged friend "Duddits" (well-played by Donnie Wahlberg as a frail, cancer-stricken adult). Then there's the story of the military cover-up, led by nutty Colonel Curtis (Morgan Freeman, in the film's best performance). There's also the horror story of an attempted alien takeover, complete with slimy worms that gestate within humans before exiting their anus in a bloody mess, as they attempt to pollute the earth's water supply.

There's a muddled, uneven quality to Dreamcatcher that arises from Goldman's overstuffed narrative, which attempts to be a Big Chill-style male bonding trip crossed with The Thing-like special effects. Throw in a monster named after Ripley from Alien, a psychic (Stand by Me) chorus of young friends, a paranoid military conspiracy on the order of Outbreak, and a bit of The X-Files for good measure. The multiple stories and tones don't gel, and never come together into anything resembling a cohesive story.

The real problem is that the male bonding is corny; pretty standard issue and predictable, and the males here are very bland. The military conspiracy, which feels like the most fun here, is handled by-the- numbers.

All of this might be forgivable if Dreamcatcher had made good on the thrills promised in its impressive trailer and ad campaign. But after a very tense and terrific scene involving a toilet and toothpicks, Kasdan commits the cardinal sin of showing us the alien incarnations in all their CGI glory, and they're underwhelming at best. Once we see full on exactly what the terror looks like - and it's not scary or original, so as a thriller it comes up short - there's really nothing much here to hold us. Last year's Signs was powerful for just that reason - we were teased and taunted about the terror of the unknown, suggested in strategically placed fingers - until the climax of the film. Signs knew how to scare us - Dreamcatcher doesn't have a clue.

Dreamcatcher doesn't come close to building that kind of suggestive tension, and once we see what Kasdan and company are up to, it's all downhill from there. It's too bad, really, because the set-up, though certainly not by any means very rich, has a light B-movie charm that gets discarded pretty quickly in service of heavy special effects.

The setting is undeniably effective - a cold, isolated cabin deep in the forest, in the middle of a debilitating storm. And there's a certain eeriness in part of the film's set-up, involving some animals and the arrival of a strange guest with a secret, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen Alien.

Freeman turns in a campy, loopy portrait of a colonel driven over the edge after twenty-five years of alien hunting. He's the best thing in the movie, whether lamenting the state of the average American's obsession with Chevrolets, Wal-Mart and "Friends," or shooting off the finger of a soldier who's lied to him.