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Once in a great while, a movie comes along that defines the time in which it was made, that transcends genre and leaves a mark for future generations of film goers. Dreamscape is not that movie. It’s more like a hitchhiker brutally run over by the Eighties, with the gruesome skidmarks of the decade left all up and down the back of its manly pink sweater.

I’ve utterly lost count of how many times I saw Dreamscape as a kid, and, watching it again after two decades, I can only surmise that this is because it damaged my brain in ways I may never fully comprehend. I remembered a few choice things about it: Dennis Quaid was in it (or maybe Jeff Bridges — I always get those two mixed up), there was a snake-man, and Eddie Albert was President somehow.

What I didn’t remember was how gloriously, unbelievably Eighties this movie is. It has everything that we have come to know and love the Eighties for having. You’ll see what I mean as we proceed. As we experience the cinematic wonder that is Dreamscape, I’ll mark especially Eighties moments with this symbol: So let’s go!

The movie opens with Eddie Albert (who’s President, somehow) having a nightmare about his wife — or possibly some other anonymous woman, as she never appears in the movie again — being vaporized by rotoscoped footage of a nuclear explosion. The President, you see, is consumed by fear of an imminent nuclear holocaust! This, of course, will be important later.

Then there’s a bit with a grim, ominous monologue by Doctor Paul Novotny (played by Max Von Sydow), explaining to a boardroom full of anonymous guys in suits that psychic powers exist. See, in the Eighties, you still had to set this stuff up. In the science fiction films of the twenty-first century, where every convenience store clerk and four-year college lesbian can summon the Lucifuge, you don’t have to spend quite so much time justifying the existence of guys bending spoons with their minds, but in the , that sort of thing required some exposition. Several hours of it, in fact, where Dreamscape is concerned.

Unfortunately for von Sydow, he’s almost instantly out-badassed by the ruthless Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer), which had to be a bit of a drag for Max. You’re Max von Sydow, the penultimate sneering Eighties villain (I mean, he was crushing people’s heads like nuts in Strange Brew, for chrissakes), you get one good villainous monologue, and then you have to play second fiddle to Christopher Plummer. Where von Sydow is the Brilliant Researcher Who Sold His Soul, Plummer plays the Amoral Corporate Heavy Who Wants to Control the World. To their credit, they both manage to play these roles without ever once looking tired.

Cut to our hero, Alex Gardner (the pink-shirted Dennis Quaid), using his psychic powers to clean up at the racetrack. He’s beaten up by a bookie that kind of looks like Soupy Sales, and comes home to an answering machine full of lusty-sounding women who beg him to call. Gardner is squandering his God-given supernatural talents on hedonistic pursuits, you see, because it’s the Me Decade!

Alex is soon wrangled into the Institute For Killing People Through Their Dreams in the Interest of National Security, though they don’t actually call it that. At least not at first. There’s a lot more setup, in which the exceedingly wonky pseudo-science of invading the dreams of others is explained in more detail than is really necessary. Let’s just say that lots of electrodes and Commodores are involved. Novotny bores Gardner (and the audience) with a disapproving diatribe about wasting his gifts on sex and winning at the ponies, when he could be doing the world a favor by killing people in the name of national security. Well, he doesn’t actually say that. At least not at first.

The movie fritters away its middle act, mostly to give Gardner a chance to hit on Novotny’s poodle-haired assistant, Jane DeVries (played by obstreperous Temple of Doom harpy Kate Capshaw). Gardner also spends some time playing the saxophone — another Eighties hallmark. This is what I mean when I say Dreamscape has everything. Not only is there a saxophone solo, not only is it a saxophone solo played during a love scene, but the protagonist himself actually plays a saxophone in the movie! He’s like Clarence Clemons, but white!

Anyway, after some token resistance to becoming the government’s guinea pig, Gardner gives in to temptation and enters the dream of some harried construction worker who keeps dreaming of falling off a tall building. This is mostly to establish that when you die in dreams, you die in real life! — and thus set the stage for what will eventually pass as the movie’s central drama. We soon find out that Gardner is so good at invading people’s dreams, that he can do it without the help of wacky electrodes or scientific instruments — he can just enter people’s subconscious at will. Naturally, the first thing he does with this power is invade Jane’s mind and make saxophone-accompanied dream sex with her. Jane, being a strong woman, objects to being mind-raped, but only for a couple moments — because, you see, she secretly liked it. Thanks, Dreamscape!

This next bit is completely unimportant to the plot, but I want to include it anyway, because it’s so unintentionally funny to me. In order to further set up Gardner’s psychic abilities, and also to add some “comic relief” to the increasingly plodding story, Gardner helps relieve the sexual issues of the dapper fellow in the bow tie, shown above. Now, despite what you may at first believe, the man’s problem is that he’s afraid his wife is cheating on him with the pith-helmeted Asian gardener — not, in fact, that he himself is flamboyantly homosexual, as his attire would almost certainly indicate. They don’t even hint at it. No, the man’s a bastion of masculinity. I guess you can still be straight and wear pastel blue and a bow tie in the

But the fun is about to be over, because then we meet the movie’s third and most blatant antagonist — Tommy Ray Glatman (played by David Patrick Kelly), whose name might as well be Psychopath O’Grannyslasher. We know that Glatman’s evil from the moment he’s on screen, as he barges into Gardner’s room, starts handling his saxophone, and then sneers menacingly every chance he gets for the next thirty minutes. Glatman is another dream-sharing psychic, like Gardner, but evil. You can tell, because his saxophone playing is terrible.

In the meantime, President Eddie Albert meets with Bob Blair (Christopher Plummer) and confesses his fears about nuclear brinksmanship. Eddie and Blair, it appears, are old buddies, and the President tells Blair that he wants to sign a peace treaty with the Russians so the world isn’t senselessly destroyed (). Blair, being a hardcore member of the military-industrial complex, tells the President he’s stone crazy, and asks the President to come on over to the Nightmare Institute for a few days to arrange for his somnambulistic assassination, er, I mean, rest up and have some banana daiquiris. The President, apparently being quite a smart cookie, agrees.

While all this is going on, Gardner seems stuck in the B-plot of his own movie. In between ravishing Jane in her sleep, he farts around the local Village Pub (the waitresses all wear bright red tee shirts that say VILLAGE PUB in blocky font), trying to ignore the suspicious horde of guys in cheap suits who keep glancing at him surreptitiously. He also meets up with massively successful but eccentric horror writer () Charlie Prince, played by none other than George Wendt. And no, before you ask, no one at VILLAGE PUB knows his name.

Wendt basically delivers the plot of the movie to the terminally clueless Gardner, in a manner so non-oblique that it would make the Brosnan-era James Bond blush. “Say, Alex Gardner, I’ve been doing some research on my book — on secret government institutes that kill people in their dreams. Know anything about it?” Unfortunately, Prince reveals that he Knows Too Much, and a biscuit-headed government assassin in a bright blue suit terminates him with extreme prejudice in the middle of a high-school afterparty.

Nooooooo-orm!

The kid gloves are off now, and the freshly captured Gardner now endures a lengthy monologue from Blair, which basically re-explains the plot as Norm — I mean Charlie Prince — just finished doing before being unceremoniously killed. Blair reveals that he plans to assassinate the President in his dreams, presumably to stop him from signing a peace treaty from the Russians, although mostly because he’s super darn evil and wants to control the world. Blair, like any good B-movie villain, is pretty undiscerning about his plausible deniability. He’ll bump off a reknowned horror writer in full view of the public to protect his secrets, but has no problem blathering his entire plan to Dennis Quaid shortly before allowing him to escape. Good work, Plummer.

Gardner resolves to save the President’s life and stop stinky old Blair from destroying the world, and so enlists Jane’s help in invading the President’s dream and stopping Glatman from killing him. In his dream. Still with us?

Incidentally, by this point, both Gardner and Glatman can, apparently, enter anybody’s dreams at will, without the electrodes or the machines that they spent the other half of the movie strapped to. Which begs the question as to why they spent so much time with the machines in the first place. Is there some science fiction movie statute wherein the main characters must spend at least 30% of any movie with electrodes on their forehead, while a poodle-haired assistant looks on and says “these readings are off the charts?”

Anyway, Gardner meets up with President Eddie Albert in his dream, and they spend the rest of the movie fleeing from Glatner, who’s now both Freddie Kruger, and a ninja. And a skilled train conducter. Glatner, you see, has mastered the art of “becoming God” in other people’s dreams, and has the power to shapeshift, grow claws, and also, most importantly, to create glow-stick nunchucks out of thin air. I know you think I’m kidding about that. Nope. He has glow-stick nunchucks. Oh, my God.

Sadly, there is no epic battle between a pink-shirted Dennis Quaid and a dream ninja with raver-chucks, as, apparently, the filmmakers thought that might be an overload of “awesome.” Instead, Glatner morphs into a man-snake and summons some dogs powered by Ghostbusters technology () to chase Gardner and Eddie around for awhile. The dogs, incidentally, are the best special effect in the movie, which is actually a little sad, as they’re pretty much filler.

The ending involves Gardner mastering in several minutes what Glatman was apparently training to do for months. Become master of all time and space inside someone else’s dreams, and make my every wish physically manifest? Why, don’t mind if I do! Capitalizing on Glatman’s psychotic past, Gardner takes the form of Glatman’s deceased father, thus distracting him long enough for President Eddie Albert to come up from behind and impale him on a piece of rebar. Yes, the President murders a man from behind, in cold blood, as his victim apologizes to the specter of his dead father. No namby-pamby milquetoast Clinton-era President here! This leader may want peace, but he still knows how to kill when the situation calls for some killin’!

Anyway, since When You Die In Dreams, You Die In Real Life, Glatman is deep-sixed, and Blair’s plans lay in ruins. Gardner is worried that Blair, with all his infinite resources and villanous evil, will now come after him. President Eddie offers to “assign some men” to Gardner, as he is now a National Hero (not valuable enough to employ or recruit, incidentally, but just enough to “assign some men to”) — but Gardner has a better idea: he murders Blair in his sleep. Murdering people in their dreams for the sake of the National Interest is amoral and horrible, but doing it to pre-emptively save your own neck is A-OK!

An old man killed in his sleep and all loose ends inexplicably wrapped up, Gardner does what any hedonist-psychic turned somnambulist-assassin would do — he takes Jane on a train ride. The very same train he mind-raped her on! Now he’s going to sex her up for real! “Remember this, Jane?” Ha! Ha! Cue tootling Maurice Jarre synthesizer music!

And so, with one final, soulful, saxophone solo, Dreamscape choo-choos out of our lives, and into our hearts. It may very well be the ultimate Eighties movie. There’s more to this movie that I haven’t included here — a brief subplot involving a freckle-faced kid named Buddy ( ), and a thrilling dirt-bike chase, along with an immortal scene where Dennis Quaid is in a phone booth and almost gets run over by a car! Fortunately, he leaps out of the phone booth at the last instant. Thank God. My heart was in my throat. At any rate, as Mark Twain once said, this is a movie experience I don’t hesitate strongly to recommend.

One last fun fact before we wrap things up. If you even for a moment doubted Dreamscape’s place in the film zeitgeist, chew on this one. Dreamscape is one of two films released in the year 1984 to:

A) be rated PG-13
B) star Kate Capshaw, and
C) Feature a guy holding a beating human heart.

The other film, of course, being Temple of Doom.

SpOooooOky!!!

Thanks for the memories, Dreamscape!