DVD review: Take a stroll through the 'Dreamscape'

Courtesy of 20th Century FOX

While Inception may be the new kid on the block in the neighborhood of movies about dreams, Dreamscape dealt with dream-linking back in 1984 (and did an alright job, all things considering). The film stars a young looking Dennis Quaid (GI Joe: Rise of Cobra) as Alex, a psychic who uses his powers strictly for personal gain. But when he gets himself in trouble with some racing track thugs, he finds a way to hide by agreeing to participate in an experiment that allows him to telepathically link up with a sleeping person in order to experience their dream.

This shared-dreaming experiment is being conducted by Dr. Paul Novotny (Max Von Sydow, The Seventh Seal, Shutter Island). He thought it up as a means to help people with sleeping disorders, namely people who suffer from really bad nightmares. And since it's an experiment, he has no idea what will happen when one of his psychic volunteers links up with a little boy having nightmares about glowing-eyed dogs and Snakeman (more on ol' Snakeman in a minute). And while he has a totally benevolent reason for this experiment, he got his funding from the Big Bad Goverment, personified here by shadowy government agent Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer, The Sound of Music, Up). If Dreamscape offers nothing else, at least it has a few scenes of acting luminaries Von Sydow and Plummer facing off. Meanwhile, Alex is trying to get with Dr. Novotny's assistant Jane (Kate Capshaw, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom), and butts heads with creepy psychic volunteer Tommy Ray (David Patrick Kelly, The Warriors, Commando).

Director Joseph Ruben (Sleeping With The Enemy) was definitely going for a rense, brooding sci-film, but much of Dreamscape did not age well. The dream sequences are mostly bad composites (that's pre-green screen technology, kids), and while the imagery should be scary or harrowing, it ends up looking a little silly. For example, the film opens with a woman running away from a nuclear blast, but she's doing that thing where she runs in place and only the cheap looking background is moving, and it just looks fake and cheesy.

And then there's Snakeman. Snakeman haunts some kid's nightmares and he looks goofy as Hell. He's a giant snake with sort of a man's body, and they cut between a close up of a giant plastic snakeman head and stop-motion animation shots of the whole body, and it looks pretty bad, even by 1984 standards. The stop-motion demon in The Golden Child is far creepier looking than Snakeman, and it's the same exact technology. In theory, Snakeman is a frightening concept, and I would hate to be running away from him every night in my dreams, but in execution, he's mostly bad rubber masks and crappy animation.

Storywise, Dreamscape holds up fine, mostly due to the relative simplicity of the plot - Dr. Novotny created it for good, Bob Blair wants to corrupt it for evil purposes, and our hero is caught in the middle. Blair wants to use the dream-linking program to assassinate the President and make it look like a heart attack, apparently because the President's recurring nuclear holocaust nightmares might make him prone to signing an unfair nuclear proliferation treaty. This is so 80's - the ultimate bad guy of the film is the Soviet threat! So Blair recruits Tommy Ray to do the murdering, and George Wendt (Fletch) pops up to tell Alex about the assassination plot, resulting in an in-dream battle for the President's life. Sounds cool, right? Rest assured, it mostly looks goofy. Maybe in '84 it looked alright, but it's another instance of "better in theory." I don't want to come across like I'm dogging this movie, because I definitely appreciate what they were going for, but it's not something that's going to make me think about my dreams any differently. I actually watched it on the sweet Netflix Instant Watch, so if you're interested in some ambitious early 80's sci-fi, you might as well check out the fun.