This week’s movie is beyond forgotten for me, I never even knew it existed until it showed up on NetFlix Instant as a recommendation for me to watch. It is Dreamscape starring Dennis Quaid and was released in 1984. Now it is available on NetFlix Instant in HD and on DVD, but was it forgotten (or unknown) for a reason?
Dreamscape comes from the director of The Stepfather and Sleeping with the Enemy and stars Dennis Quaid, Christopher Plummer, Eddie Albert (Green Acres), Kate Capshaw (SpaceCamp, Temple of Doom), David Patrick Kelly (Warriors, The Crow), and Max Von Sydow. Now I know all of these actors and have seen many movies with them, yet again, I never heard of this movie. I have watched some random and obscure movies in my day so I don’t know how something like this could slip by me all these years.
The basic story is that psychics truly do exist and some scientists have found a way to let psychics link up into other people’s dreams and fully interact with the dream as if it were real. The purpose of all this research is to be able to find out what is happening in someone’s subconscious that may be causing them issues to try to work them out. Or is it…? I do not want to give too much away, but instead of being a cool sci-fi/fantasy movie or horror movie, it is instead a cold war thriller. They have "someone the CIA and FBI don’t want to even touch" running a group that is using the research to carry out assassinations since the old urban legend of "if you die in your sleep, you die for real" is true. Not knowing what to expect I had an open mind and the movie started off really cool, but once it became obvious what the true plot was the movie lost me and I stopped caring. Having grown up in the 80s I have seen my fair share of movies that try to have a message or play on people’s fears of the Communists, but for some reason this one just didn’t seem to hold up as well as others.
The dream sequences themselves did look cool though with the use of wide angle lenses and time lapse photography to give it that dream-like look and feel to it. Unfortunately, there were not too many of them in the movie, and what was there lasted very briefly. There were a couple, especially the one that was a dream of the little boy, that lead me to see glimpses of a possibility of it being a cool horror movie, but as I said, that is not what the screen writers had in mind when writing this movie.
As I mentioned in the opening of this review, the movie was in fact in HD on NetFlix Instant. It is also available on DVD (no Blu-Ray release) but for this review I watched the NetFlix stream. Click here to see NetFlix instant listing for it. Although in HD the print is dirty and had lots of flecks and scratches. While not a horrible print, it could have been better, but luckily a lot of scenes still looked very good. I am sure that due to the status of this movie that this is probably the best it will ever look as there is financially no reason to go back and digitally clean it up. As with DVD version it is edited to remove a couple shots of nudity inexplicable, yet has both F bombs. This was the 2nd movie to ever be released with a PG-13 rating (the first being Red Dawn which was released only a few weeks prior to this) and had that content in its theatrical run, so I have no idea why it is missing from the DVD other than maybe a TV print source was the best they could find for this release.
3/5 stars - In all, a movie with some cool ideas lost as a victim of the time it was released. Some enjoyment was had by watching it, but there is a reason this movie is not as well known as others from that era.
