Stephen King takes more lumps from Hollywood. For every successful trip from novel to screen — Carrie, The Shining, The Dead Zone, Misery — Maine's scaremeister must assess the damage done to Cujo, Firestarter, Pet Semetery and on and on. Dreamcatcher is the first novel King wrote after a van ran him down in 1999. Now it's a film directed by Lawrence Kasdan (The Big Chill), who wrote the script with William Goldman (All the President's Men). Pretty lofty company for a flick about aliens popping out of people's asses. These so-called "shit weasels" look like the thing that burst out of John Hurt's belly in Alien.

To be fair, Dreamcatcher starts more subtly, with four friends — Henry the shrink (Thomas Jane), Beaver the carpenter (Jason Lee), Pete the car salesman (Timothy Olyphant) and Jonesy the college prof (Damian Lewis) — enjoying a hunting weekend in the Maine woods. The guys are linked by a childhood incident in which they saved a sickly boy, Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg), from bullies. This is King in Stand by Me mode. Then the aliens show up, chased by Morgan Freeman as a nut-job Army colonel, and the movie degenerates into a sorry, silly, gory, punishingly overlong (131 minutes) creature feature. King deserves better.

“Karma Chameleon”

Boy George has said this song was about standing by what you believe in. However, at the time, he was involved in a secret affair with Culture Club drummer Jon Moss. "Now people can understand the songs better," he said. "They were written about my relationship with Jon, and they were also written about being a gay man in a homophobic world." The lines "If I listen to your lies, would you say/I'm a man without conviction/I'm a man who doesn't know how to sell a contradiction," described his life at the time, he said. "I was selling this big lie."