Baby-faced Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid, Innerspace) is a gadabout psychic specializing in extreme telekinesis, perpetual womanizing and dim-witted snark: “Who’s your decorator? Darth Vader?” He’s “recruited” for an extended stay at Thornhill College to participate in a top-secret project; over a pitcher a beer at a proto-Hooters pub, Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow, Flash Gordon) lays it all out: The doc is researching how to psychically project a person into another’s dream and have that person actively participate with — and protect — the REM-phase sleeper.
Having succeeded in the how-to portion, Novotny wants Alex and his considerable mind powers to join the team. Being on the run from gambling-related goons, Alex accepts, and Dreamscape works best when depicting his lab sessions of the surreal and nonsensical. Years away from CGI, director Joseph Ruben (1987’s The Stepfather) has to rely upon cut-rate green screens and matte paintings, but these effects are nonetheless effective. Besides, dreams are imperfect, so having the seams show seems appropriate.
For the first two-thirds of the film, the dream sequences differ wildly in tone. The one set atop an under-construction skyscraper is riddled with high-anxiety suspense, while one involving infidelity is funny. Viewers are served one that is genuinely scary (with a Snakeman lurking among Caligari-esque corridors) and one that is genuinely sexy (as Alex enjoys train-car copulation with a project researcher played by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom‘s Kate Capshaw in her prime).
If only Dreamscape didn’t collapse in its final act, when the focus shifts from Alex to the President of the United States (Eddie Albert, The Devil’s Rain). Plagued by visions of a nuclear holocaust, the leader of our free world just wants “these damn nightmares to end!,” while others wish to end him. On the whole, the movie is like a ’70s conspiracy thriller wrapped in an issue of EC Comics’ Weird Science. I loved it without question or criticism upon its premiere, when I was 13; I like it fine today. —Rod Lott
And there’s also David Patrick Kelly playing the creepy nutjob, as he did in many 80s movies. But yeah, Kate Capshaw was hot back then.
LOVE THIS ONE. Should watch it again, was on constant rotation on my VHS collection when I was a kid.