I'm sure there's some kind of essay to be written on Dennis Quaid going from trying to prevent a Ronald Reagan stand-in from starting a nuclear war to, 20 years later, playing Ronald Reagan, but we'll leave that for another time. Peacock is streaming 1984's Dreamscape. Let's go.
Quick Plot: Dr. Novotny is running a successful series of studies on dream immersion, sending psychics into patients' REM cycles to help identify underlying problems in their lives. It's great for curing impotency, but Novotny's aims are peanuts compared to government agent Bob Blair, who sees this new technology as a means of far greater things.
Since Blair is played by Max Von Sydow, you can be pretty sure such things are not exactly related to world peace.
Enter Alex Gardner (Quaid), a former psychic prodigy turned loan shark-owing gambler. Novotny brings Alex back to help develop his studies. While there, Alex falls for Dr. Jane DeVries (Kate Capshaw), a woman who could do a lot better than a jerk who sneaks into her dreams to have sex with her without consent. But it's 1984, they're both attractive, so we move on to them uniting to save the world.
See, there's a very important man having nightmares: the President of the United States. He's plagued with visions of a nuclear wasteland, which worries Blair, who would rather not see his country move to disarmament. Blair's plan is to send his pet psychic Tommy into the President's dream for a sleepy assassination. Alex has some warning from horror novelist Charlie Prince (Norm!) but as bodies begin to pile up, it's clear the only way to save the world is to do some inception.
Dreamscape is a fun little sci-fi horror dripping with its time. The script has multiple writers credited, including Chuck Russell, who would go on to use quite a few small touches from this film into the beloved Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Director Joseph Ruben was never a stranger to oddness in genre cinema: this is the man who turned a kidnapping film into an alien invasion in The Forgotten, and who I think about every day for the last 30 years because he's responsible for the absolutely bonkers The Good Son.
We do not talk nearly enough about The Good Son.
Dreamscape doesn't quite reach those heights (and literally, because REMEMBER HOW THIS MOVIE ENDS?)
Sorry, it's hard to ever focus on something that isn't The Good Son when talking adjacently about The Good Son.
AS I WAS SAYING, Dreamscape is neat. It feels of its time in catching that late '70s/early '80s psychological experimental era of The Brood and The Fury, but with more electric music that even bridges the upcoming early '90s with some sexy saxophone magic. Plus, there's even some timely nuclear war politics! Quaid shows the charisma that would make him a star. Capshaw is smart and sexy. The dreams are just weird enough to feel like dreams. It's a good time.
High Points
By golly this is a good cast
Low Points
Aforementioned ickiness regarding the fuzzy sexual assault question and resolution
Lessons Learned
The best way to get a cad to do something is to invoke the IRS
In our dreams, we're often very racist
The easiest shorthand to imply 'unhinged psychopath' is simply casting David Patrick Kelly
Rent/Bury/Buy
Dreamscape is quite fun. Sure, the visual dream language is basically a karaoke music video filmed in 1992 eastern Europe, but there's a lot to enjoy here. I watched via Peacock, which did occasionally have a weird bug happening where at least two scenes weren't transferring correctly. Not sure if that was simply my connection, but I figured it was worth a warning.