Badmovies.org Forum

Another childhood favorite revisited.  I thought it held up pretty well.

Dreamscape is the tale of Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid), telepathic genius, who is persuaded into entering a government research program on dreams.  Seems a Dr. Novotny (Max Von Sydow) and the love interest Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw) have built a machine that lets telepaths enter other people's dreams.  This would bode well for psychiatry, however secret agent man Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer) and his slimy hunchman Tommy Ray Glatman (David Patrick Kelly) have more sinister plans involving the President of the United States.

The movie has some serious 80's stylings going on, from the synthesizer music to the rogueish, devil-may-care genius, but it's still pretty watchable.  The dream scenes are still fairly interesting, although often overrun by blue screening.  I enjoyed most of the acting in this movie, especially from Christopher Plummer, who was actually quite restrained.  And let's not forget David Patrick Kelly ("Waarriooooors. . . Come out and plaaaaay. . ."), who is in full on creep mode.  The only place where the movie really bogged down is in the espionage-style chase scenes near the end.

The DVD doesn't have many extras, most of them centering around the creation of the snake creature.  Did I forget to mention the snake creature?  Scared the hell out of me as a kid, although now it leans towards the silly side.  There is also a commentary track that I didn't listen to, from the director and special effects people.

I wanted to give the movie four slimes, but it only deserves three.  But hey, it's got Norm from Cheers in it.  Somebody buy that man a beer.

Dreamscape was definitely a cable mainstay. I used to like that flick as much as I enjoyed Runaway, with Tom Selleck and Gene Simmons. For some reason, I remember seeing those movies back-to-back an awful lot.

You had the cobra/snake dudes in Dreamscape, and the funky robot spiders in Runaway. Both have tacky synth soundtracks. Made for a great double feature.

I do remember the love scenes being particularly sucky in Dreamscape. Like, so sucky, you feel embarrassed for the actors.

Ah, summer of 1984...I was spending the summer in the states after spending almost an entire year in Hong Kong.  I was 16.

The PG-13 rating was just getting started.  Ghostbusters was the summer flick to see.  Family groups were squealing about how mature the violence in Gremlins was and it should not be a PG rated family film (which is how it was marketed, the stink that was raised about seemed truly incredible at the time).  I saw Jaws 3-D on video (Betamax that is) and cable more times than I thought possible (not to mention Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, a movie so bad that...well see it and understand).  I bought a brand new clamshelled video of Dawn of the Dead that retailed for 69.95, plus tax.

I saw Dreamscape opening weekend.  We almost bought tickets to see the other movie opening that weeked on the other screen (most theaters only had two or three back in those innocent we're-all-gone-die-in-a-nuclear-blast-apocalypse days), and that was, I believe, Red Dawn.  But my bud and I choose Dreamscape, the poster made it look like an Indiana Jones type of adventure movie, which it wasn't.

The movie itself...cool in its eighties trash kind of way.  The snake man was really freaky at the time, especially in the nightmare sequences, and all the running around seemed kind of silly, I wanted them to be in dreams and fighting snake monster, not doing motorcycle versus car chases on race tracks and what not.  For nostalgia and good those-were-the-days memories it brings back the movie rates three slimes.

Now don't get me started on 1986....

For a movie so "made-for-TV" quality and with such a cast (Selleck? Simmons? Alley? Rhoades? Yaaaaaaaah!), why do I love this so much?

Soundtrack by the Master, Jerry Goldsmith. He can take a completely horrible cornball final shot (as in "Runaway," "The Swarm," "Capricorn One," etc.) and produce a score that rises so far above it, it almost works. "Runaway" is one of my guilty-pleasure favorite scores.

(It never ceases to p**s me off that John Williams has a shelf of Oscars for his overbearing, repetitive racket, and plagarist James Horner has a few for material he's stolen from Goldsmith and others, yet with his enormous body of consistently excellent work, Goldsmith has one stinking Oscar ["The Omen"]. Hollywood, eat me.)

Goldsmith has been burned so often by "Oscar the Dip Wad" that it has passed pathetic into tradegy.  He seems to be the Susan Lucci of film music, nominated countless times while those with a far inferior body of work get the glory.  I used to have a huge Goldsmith collection, now it's simply large.  A few cassettes were lost in moves or eaten by a hungry tape deck.

A black band for the lost tapes please:

Runaway
Supergirl (which has been reissued, whoo-hoo!)
Link (this score rocks and I miss it so much it makes me want to cry)

And what the hell are they doing giving Dino De Horrendous the IRVING THALBERG AWARD FOR!

Dreamscape was a fairly awful movie... the first
half hour or so sets up a great premise, which
it fails to deliver on.  A catalogue of wasted
opportunities, really.  And the electronic music
was BAD, as in lose-your-faith-in-humanity bad.
It sounded like Maurice taped his cat walking
on the keyboard.

There was one funny moment, though, when DQ
shape-shifts into the psycho villian's dead
father.  While he's wracked with guilt, the
president sneaks up from behind and rams a pipe
through him.  "Daddy, I'm sor...URK!"
Our hero, a dirty cheater. :)