Dreamscape (1984)

A government dream lab has worked out how to send psychics into other people’s nightmares. So what do you do with a breakthrough like that? Cure a little boy who’s being terrorised by a snake man, sort out a steelworker who keeps falling off a skyscraper, and then, obviously, train up a dream assassin and point him at the President. Dennis Quaid plays the gambling, beer-swilling chancer they blackmail into it, and patrons voted it in as our Halloween pick. It turns out to be a lot less horror and a lot more Cold War than either of us expected, but stick around anyway, because we had a great time with it.

Dreamscape came out in August 1984, a few days after Red Dawn became the first film released with the brand new PG-13 rating, and three months before A Nightmare on Elm Street. Director Joseph Ruben steps up from drive-in teen comedies like The Pom Pom Girls and G.O.R.P. The story is by David Loughery, who’d go on to write Star Trek V, the one where they meet God, and plenty of people reckon co-writer Chuck Russell took a few notes with him when he made A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Kate Capshaw arrives straight from Temple of Doom, the poster dresses Quaid up as Indiana Jones, and the whole thing cost around $6 million and doubled its money.

What makes Dreamscape such an oddity is that it’s two decades at once: a 70s Cold War political thriller, drip-feeding its conspiracy all the way to the White House, melded with wacky, effects-driven 80s high concept.

In this episode we get into David Patrick Kelly doing his best villain again (who can forget his turn in The Warriors), this time with laser nunchucks, razor fingernails and an unhealthy obsession with Kung-Fu Flix. We also get into why you never let a creep near your saxophone, and the deeply invasive dream train scene that Kate Capshaw plays brilliantly and the script breezes past. Plus whether a dream assassin is any use when you still need to get two floors from the Soviet premier, why Max von Sydow should have swapped roles with Christopher Plummer, and a snake man who started life as a rat man.

Hide the saxophone, keep one eye open for snake men, and settle in.

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Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.

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