Dreamscape (1984)

 ☆ ☆ ☆

Dreamscape (1984) – J. Ruben

Promising high concept thriller let down by its low budget and ‘80s production – Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) took the basic premise and did it better. Dennis Quaid is a psychic who, with the help of scientist Max Von Sydow, learns to enter people’s dreams. As expected, he’s a cocky kid but with a good heart, genuinely wanting to help people having nightmares, but also using his powers to win at the racetrack and put the moves on researcher Kate Capshaw.  Enter Christopher Plummer as the Deep State head honcho who wants to train people to enter dreams to extract information and also to kill targets in an untraceable way (if you die in your dream, you die for real -- but it looks like a heart attack). When the President (Eddie Albert) decides he wants to go for nuclear disarmament and Plummer disagrees, it is up to Quaid to enter the President’s dreams to fight off Plummer’s own dream-surfing psychic (David Patrick Kelly). It’s all pretty cheesy but, you know, not bad.  You can see why Quaid’s career took off around this time.