“I know what
you’re afraid of Alex.”
In 2010 Christopher Nolan gave us
“Inception” and showed how dreams can affect the real world. In the fall of 1984 Wes Craven’s “A Nightmare
on Elm Street” showed us how you can die in your dreams. But a few months earlier in the summer of ’84
B-movie director Joseph Ruben stepped up his game and showed us the
possibilities that can occur when we sleep with “Dreamscape”.
Starring
Dennis Quaid as a psychic who left the institute that helped him develop his
power and now uses it to gamble and score with women. His former mentor played by Max von Sydow brings
him back to the institute to help with a secret government project run by the
always villainous Christopher Plummer as Blair the man intent on using the
dream-walkers abilities to help assassinate selected targets in their sleep. The other villain of the piece is played by
the creepy David Patrick Kelly who most remember as Luther in “The Warriors”
where he uttered the immortal line “Warriors, come out to plaaayyy.” He’s not in the film much but is memorable
especially in the final nightmare showdown.
Kate Capshaw rounds out the cast as the love interest complete with the
80’s hair and shoulder pads.
This was one
of those films that gained its cult following because of the amount of times it
was run on basic cable in the 80’s.
Looking at it now I can see why it was overshadowed by the first
appearance of Freddy Krueger, which focuses solely on the horror elements of
dreams. “Dreamscape” is kinda all over
the place as far as tone. The dreams run
from the ordinary fear of falling from a skyscraper to the wacky cheating wife,
all the way to the terrifying monster of a little boy’s nightmare.
It never
fully commits to one particular genre.
And that is part of the charm of the film, you don’t get settled in to
laughing or being scared, it’s just a fun and relatively short ride running
just over an hour and a half. The
concept has that “Twilight Zone” appeal and I think, on its own is still really
strong, assassinating political figures in their sleep? It screams Cold War and it’s only covered
briefly in the film but I think more could have been done with that particular
storyline. The effects in the film rely heavily on the widely used green-screen
process which became cheaper to do after 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back”. Most TV commercials look better by comparison,
but in the end whenever you got Dennis Quaid, spike-ended nunchucks, and snake
monsters, you got a classic.
--Robert L.
Castillo
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