Dreamscape (1984) – Review

Long before Christopher Nolan was incepting Leonardo DiCaprio into people’s dreams a little film by Joseph Ruben called Dreamscape had pretty much done that very same thing, mind you, with an incredibly lower budget and a lot less metaphysical mumbo jumbo to confound the viewer, nonetheless, it turned out to be an interesting if problematic little gem that has developed quite the cult following over the years.

The basic premise of Dreamscape is what really sells the movie “If you could enter someone’s dreams what effect would this have on the dreamer?” The hero of the movie is a young psychic named Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) who after turning his back on scientific research when in his late teens he has since been using his unique talents to make money from gambling and womanizing, as many of us would given the chance, but now his old mentor Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow) has a new project that he is sure Alex would be perfect for. With angry bookies on his heels and an IRS audit threatening his five years’ worth of gambling winnings, Alex agrees to join this government-funded psychic dream research program, and that one of the lead scientists is the beautiful Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw) certainly was a bonus.  But what exactly is the purpose of this research?  Novotny explains that they hope to unlock the mysteries of the mind and help people suffering from debilitating nightmares.

“This is not a Cronenberg film, so the odds of your head exploding are actually quite small.”

As this is a science fiction/thriller there are obviously going to be elements of conspiracy and murder to spice things up, which in the case of Dreamscape is provided by the character of Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), who is a powerful government player with plans to use the research to create psychic assassins that can kill their targets within their own dreams thus leaving no evidence of murder behind, and to aid him in this task is Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly), one of Novotny’s top “dream projectors” but who is also clearly a deranged psychopath. These two characters bring up a big question and an even bigger problem with the script “Why would the benevolent Dr. Paul Novotny become involved with these people?” Sure, Blair is needed so as to provide the funds for the research, and we even learn that Blair and Novotny are friends of a sort, but if they are so close how does Novotny not know that even among the government agencies Blair is considered a scary guy? Things begin to get interesting when Alex runs into horror author Charlie Prince (George Wendt) who warns him of just how bad a dude this Blair guy is, and if this random Stephen King knock-off knows Blair is bad news you’d think Novotny would at least have a clue.

Every single shot of Bob Blair in this film screams “He’s Evil!”

But hey, if you need funding maybe you may have to overlook where the money is coming from but why for the love of God would you let someone like Tommy Ray Glatman anywhere near this project, sure, people with the required psychic abilities must be rare but Glatman was once committed to Bellevue Hospital for murdering his father and had been diagnosed as being a sociopathic murder. I don’t care how small the pool of qualified psychics is would you really want a crazed killer wandering through the brains of your test subjects? And it’s not as if Novotny was kept in the dark about Glatman’s past because Alex finds detailed files on the little psycho right in Novotny’s office.  So we must ask the question “Is Novotny simply careless, desperate, criminally negligent or all three?” The only reason his character is even remotely likable is that he’s being played by the great Max von Sydow and he provides the necessary gravitas and intelligence to sell such a role, of course, the shadowy government plot about psychic assassins is simply the framework for the cool concept of people entering someone’s dreams and in that area Dreamscape really delivers.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

Alex is able to use his dream projecting ability to help several test subjects; including a construction worker afraid of falling, a neurotic husband who thinks his attractive wife is cheating on him and a little boy who is plagued by a horrible “snake-man” but the key nightmares in this film belong to the President of the United States (Eddie Albert) who has been plagued by reoccurring nightmares of a post-nuclear war wasteland and seeing his late wife being consumed by an atomic firestorm, but what really bothers Blair most is that his old friend The President is being crippled by these nightmarish images and what is alarming to him is that they are also causing him to think about weakening America’s nuclear deterrent at the upcoming negotiations for nuclear disarmament, thus he enlists Glatman to murder the President during one of these nightmares.

“I’m going to be the Lee Harvey Oswald of dreams.”

There is a lot to enjoy in Dreamscape, from the German expressionist dream sequences to the cool stop-motion animated snake-man, there are some truly great visuals on display here, especially considering its surprisingly small budget, unfortunately, the film’s lead protagonists don’t hold up their end all that well and they greatly weaken the story. We have the aforementioned Dr. Novotny’s terrible hiring practices but we also have the normally lovable Dennis Quaid as a sax-playing womanizer who at one point in the film enters the dream of Dr. Jane DeVries so that he can have sex with her and by anyone’s book that’s tantamount to rape, I don’t care that she gets over it and that they eventually live happily ever after it’s still very very wrong.  Then we have the fact that after saving the President from Glatman’s dream attack Alex later enters Blair’s dream and kills him, and sure, Blair was an evil bastard and one who is apparently somehow so untouchable that even an attempt on the President’s life gets him a free pass, but to cold-bloodedly kill him in a dream puts Alex in the same league as Blair and Glatman. That the character is being played by Dennis Quaid does help mitigate some of this a bit but it still makes him a less than a stellar hero, of course, when one watches Dreamscape the questionable morality of the protagonist isn’t what you remember, you remember the snake-guy.

“Dream Warriors, come out and play-eh!”

Overall, Dreamscape was a nice little flick from the 80s that at least tried to be a bit different and a little outside the box, balancing conspiracy elements ala Brian De Palma’s Blow Out with a dash of science fiction ideas similar to Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm, all culminating in a nice cinematic gem from an era known for being a bit crazy when it came to genre outings.