Product: Dreamscape [VHS] (1984)
Rating: 4.0
An underrated blast from the past
Dreamscape is a fun, if undeniably underrated, thriller from the early 1980s. Dennis Quaid plays a psychic who is recruited into a secret, government-funded operation by Max Von Sydow. Under the direction of Von Sydow and colleague Kate Capshaw, Quaid learns how to enter other people's dreams. Amongst other things, this ability allows Quaid to romance the reluctant Capshaw and to help a small boy who is haunted by nightmares involving a demonic creature known as Snake Man (who, years later, remains one of screen history's scariest monsters). However, Quaid also discovers that the real force behind the project is Presidential advisor Christopher Plummer and Plummer has somewhat more sinister goals in mind for Quaid's newfound abilities. President Eddie Albert, it seems, is having nightmares of his own and there leading him to sign a disarmament pact with the Russians. While Plummer makes plan to send his own personal assassin (David Patrick Kelly) into the President's dreams, Quaid and Capshaw struggle to save the President's life.Dreamscape is an entertaining film that, luckily, doesn't take itself all that seriously. The film itself is a hybrid of several different genres -- part horror film, part political conspiracy thriller, part speculative science fiction, and part comedy and director Joseph Ruben manages to pull of an impressive balancing act by seemlessly integrating all of these elements into a cohesive whole that actually holds together pretty well. Ruben keeps the action moving nicely and brings a truly memorable flair to the film's dream sequences. As stated previously, the Snake Man (a creation that would simply be a cartoonish computer-generated image if the film were made today) is still truly frightening and the President's nightmares, with their images of nuclear devastation, still retain their power to disturb. Ruben also gets uniformly good performances from his cast with special praise going to David Patrick Kelly who creates one of the most memorably quirky and hateful film villians of the 1980s. All in all, Dreamscape is a blast from the past that is more than worth tracking down.