“We are currently experiencing a twelve-year delay on the orange and blue lines…”

Dreamscape oozes “eighties science-fiction movie” from every frame, which is not — contrary to what my friend Blogless Mike might think — a good thing. It’s not just in the overly-pastel shades and the fluffy hair. It’s in the music, it’s in the way the plot develops, and it’s especially in the nuclear-war paranoia.

Alex Gardner (Dennis Quaid) is a psychic with more or less generalized skills. He’s precognitive, but for some odd reason that apparently only works when he’s at the race track. He’s also a telepath, but that only works when he’s picking up chicks. And although we never see it, there’s some mention of spoon-bending too, so we can assume he’s telekinetic as well. Either that, or there is no spoon.

Once a favored test subject of psychologist Dr. Paul Novotny (Max von Sydow), Alex has abandoned the academic life and now uses his psychic talents to win at horses and seduce women. But Dr. Novotny has moved on from the standard “what card am I holding” telepathy research and is now trying to train dreamwalkers to enter and observe people’s dreams for diagnostic and treatment purposes. So he (somewhat forcibly) recruits the very talented but also very obnoxious Alex to participate.

Fortunately for them both, there’s no shortage of patients with bad dreams for Alex and Novotny to practice on. Also fortunately, one of the patients is none other than the President of the United States (Eddie Albert of “Green Acres”), who’s bad dreams of a nuclear holocaust threaten nuclear disarmament talks. So the project has government funding. But this being the eighties, of course, the government puppetmaster in charge of the purse strings (Christopher Plummer as Bob Blair) wants to weaponize this technology to make dreamwalking superspies who can assassinate people in their dreams.

Damn Bill Clinton, always messing with my stuff.

So yeah. Wow. Spies, elaborate fantasy-dream worlds, and a President in trouble — tense stuff, yes?

Unfortunately, no. The film suffers from atrocious pacing. We don’t actually get to the main President-in-trouble conflict until the last act, which makes the primary conflict of the entire movie feel like an afterthought. In the interim, we get a few dream sequences that really are genuinely stunning as far as sets are concerned — great sky effects and wildly distorted nightmare landscapes — but none of the dreams actually push the story forward in a significant way.

There’s a steelworker afraid of falling, a kid with horrible nightmares about a monster, a middle-aged man dealing with feelings of sexual inadequacy, and a female sidekick who’s dreams are straight off the cover of a Harlequin romance novel. And none of them really relate to each other. The result: the tension is entirely generated by special effects and creepy imagery, and only to specific dream sequences. There’s practically no carry-over otherwise.

Oh, and the dream sequences are short. For a movie that’s supposed to be about dreamwalking, you’ld think there would be a lot of dreamwalking. But there’s not. Most of the action of the movie occurs in the waking world, which is a disappointment. There’s a lot of sneaking around a college campus, making anxious phone calls, and even a chase scene at the race track.

What? You spent the whole budget on me?!

Oh, and there’s the believability factor too. I’m not speaking here of the dreamwalking, which is actually the easiest concept to swallow. Early in the film, for example, Alex picks up his saxophone and plays a few notes of a Kenny G riff, during which sounds come out of the instrument even when Alex has the mouthpiece nowhere near his lips. It’s that kind of attention to detail that makes watching Dreamscape so goshdarn rewarding.

There’s also lot of stuff that just doesn’t make any sense — unlocked, unguarded laboratories filled with top-secret government research equipment, pointless chase scenes, a Presidential security detail not competent enough to guard the loading dock of the building he’s staying in, dogs that can’t smell intruders less than six feet away, and so forth.

But the movie does have George Wendt in slightly-more than a cameo. And the excellent older actors — Sydow, Plummer, and Albert — give back to the movie much more than the script gave them.

Dreamscape manages to hit just the right level of retro-mediocrity that makes it a fantastic choice for the amateur MST3K treatment. There are some real howlers of continuity and believability, and Alex is so obnoxious you and your friends will ache to make fun of him. But don’t let anyone trick you into thinking the movie is a classic.

You don’t understand! John Couger Mellencamp is Freddy Kruger!