By Charlie Wachtel
An 80s movie that really knows how to be 80s
Have you ever seen Dennis Quaid with a mullet? Ever see Dennis Quaid look like a woman? Like Ashton Kutcher meets Jack Nicholson? Well you probably haven’t until you’ve seen Joseph Ruben’s Dreamscape. Here is a film with more eighties flavor than Pop Rocks. A lesser known addition to the sci-fi/horror genre, Dreamscape concerns a government sponsored project which employs people with psychic abilities to try and enter people’s dreams and provide dream therapy.
After a patient mysteriously dies in her sleep during dream therapy, gifted psychic Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) decides to investigate the man in charge, Dr. Paul Novotny (Max Von Sydow). Gardner later learns that Dr. Novotny is sending assassins into patients’ dreams to have them killed. When the President of the United States (Eddie Albert) is having nightmares of nuclear war, he seeks help from Dr. Novotny who considers the President’s dreams a threat to national security. In order for Gardner to save the President and the patients under experiment, he must figure out a way to terminate the government-funded project altogether.
So let’s get this straight. People who possess psychic powers are getting paid lots of money from the government to enter a person’s dream and fight evil! Talk about a bailout plan–-somebody get Obama on the phone. If only this were real. That’s the thing about eighties movies, they all had great concepts.
For certain high-concept sci-fi/horror flicks from the 80s, scripts were usually not a high priority. And Dreamscape is no exception. A high- concept plot-combo of The Dead Zone (1983) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Dreamscape is executed in a far less convincing manner than both films and with swiss-cheese-sized plot holes. It also would have made no money at the box office if it hadn’t been released three months before the terrifying A Nightmare on Elm Street. The main issue, the villain in Dreamscape, is David Patrick Kelly. He’s the weaselly Southern guy from Commando. Compare that to Robert Englund.
But Dennis Quaid does abuse his psychic powers and dream-rape Kate Capshaw (yes! that’s right. Steven Spielberg’s wife!). Just about the most whimsically-played, disturbing part of a any film until Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man. And Dreamscape does boast those wonderful eighties conventions: intense use of the synthesizer, half-assed CGI, the acceptance of bizarre scientific breakthroughs and theories, a cynical view towards the American government, and, again…Dennis Quaid with a mullet. So if you haven’t seen Dreamscape yet, you may or may not feel obligated to waste your time. But if you haven’t seen an eighties movie yet, Dreamscape’s not a bad place to start.
Charlie Wachtel is a Senior Writer for The Film Crusade and Founder of www.filmcrusade.com.
