Dreamscape

Dreamscape

Director ~ Joseph Ruben

Writers ~ David LougheryChuck RussellJoseph Ruben

1984, USA

Stars ~ Dennis Quaid, Max von Sydow, Christopher Plummer

If you’re looking for an 80s sci-fi thriller, there are probably none more 80s than ‘Dreamscape’, much of the blame of which can be put on Maurice Jarre’s synth-score, which is sometimes/often unintentionally amusing. But when Dennis Quaid outwits some small-time crooks on a racecourse and goes home to fawning answerphone messages from women, then picks up a saxophone to chill with to establish his cool, there can surely be no doubt of the era. Also, the smirky Quaid poster than implies this is some kind of Indiana Jones romp wannabe is criminally misleading when it is more derived more from the psychic thrillers of the 70s and the post-‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ dream-horrors of the era.  But maybe the awkward poster-image is indicative of the marketing confusion of how to sell a nightmarish-lite thriller-horror that is a little tonally muddled.

There’s some love interest in a lab coat, but this is a boys’ tale. When you have Christopher Plummer and David Patrick Kelly in the cast, you know who the bad guys are (and Kelly will never be cool enough to play sax), and there you have Max Von Sydow making the cheesiest of dialogue and exposition sound credible (“Project!”). It’s also defiantly rooted in its era for its Cold War Nuclear fears: the President is having dreams of Nuclear Holocaust that are making him lean towards a disarmament deal which doesn’t sit well with the political Hawks around him. The political paranoia and conspiracies are familiar from Seventies psychic horrors like ‘Scanners’ and ‘Fury’, although the dream angle comes as a new spin, although it’s only the wonky dreamscape staircase that truly tests the surrealist realism of dreams. The nadir is the gong for a punchline for its one Asian character, but the glaring flaw is its central Snakeman terror that, with all the best will in the world, with its inconsistent design that veers between rubberiness and Harryhausen charm, doesn’t inspire anything terrible.

But it is a film that is entertaining because of and for all its flaws, for the nostalgia. Shallow, but it ultimately does achieve some campy romp.

 

Harlequin

Simon Wincer, 1980, Australia

Screenplay by Everett de Roche, a reliable genre writer, This hodgepodge oddity is one of those films that, as a kid, I could throw in with psychic power films and stuff like ‘The Medusa Touch’, ‘The Fury’, ‘Carrie’ or even ‘The Omen’ and 'The Gate', where anything seemed possible, where an unseen logic dictated strange occurrences. Where a stain on the floor turns into a face, for example. Like superheroes, such abilities appeal greatly to power fantasies and ‘Harlequin’ certainly appeals to a male fantasy of mysterious powers as well as those of martyrdom.

It’s a rendering of the Rasputin story where a mysterious stranger called Gregory Wolfe (how’s that for allusion?) ingratiates himself into the political Rast family by seemingly curing the terminally ill son. Wolfe’s ultimate plan is to show the ambitious politician Rast (David Hemmings – and don’t forget to spell “Rast” backwards) how he is being manipulated by devious superiors, but it’s not clear how he plans to do this by spending months talking and smirking cryptically, turning up in hilarious garb and bedding Rast’s trophy wife (Carmen Duncan).

Robert Powell as Gregory is just short of the full-on camp of ‘Rocky Horror’s Tim Curry, but it’s campness of the inadvertent kind: he spouts French for flirting, acts like a dick to the women, holds the child over cliff-edges for some lesson about the closeness of Death. Occasionally he indulges in parlour tricks, spangly eyebrows and – when exercising true magic which everyone seems to just accept as illusions – charmingly dodgy effects. It still appeals for being offbeat, a mishmash of political and horror-fantasy that makes it winningly offbeat and always intriguing. When potentially anything goes, there’s always anticipation for being surprised. But no, it doesn’t quite go full-on bonkers, although Powell does wear a Harlequin outfit (which he must have hired from the same place he got the clown outfit).

‘Harlequin’ turns up in discussions of the run of Ozploitation films of the 70s and 80s, a slick and offbeat inclusion. It smudges its Australian origins by importing British leads and dubbing characters in American, but Powell’s frosty charm and Hemming’s slightly hangdog blustering raise the bar even as Duncan is constantly throwing herself at Gregory’s feet. Richard Kuipers gives a good rundown of how this is “the most ‘internationalised’ of [Australian] genre pictures”, and notes that upon release,

“Australian critics and audiences may have been cool but the story overseas was very different. Harlequin won awards at the prestigious Sitges and Paris Fantasy Film Festivals, received theatrical release in the US and UK and was a sizeable hit in several Latin American territories.”

It’s datedness, its unintended campness and the fact that it’s determinedly unspecific on many details all add to its fascination. If it doesn’t quite make sense at the end, if there’s a sense that the audience has always been kept at a slight distance throughout by intention or lacuna, that all becomes part of the mystery.

* I also note that the recent 88 Films blu-ray release also features a epilogue where the corpse is found by boys fishing, which is different to how I saw it end originally and makes more sense of Wolfe’s actions. 

Scanners

David Cronenberg, 
Canada, 1981

Popular early Cronenberg where his excursions into physical and psychological breakdowns take on a decidedly more commercial bent. Compared to the more medical – and difficult – tone to his earlier works, a more straightforward thriller trajectory makes ‘Scanners’ a more accessible tale of battling psychics and exploding heads. Scanners are telepaths with remarkable mental abilities that allow for all kinds of random and telekinetic possibilities. They are being rounded up and recruited by Michael Ironside for a war against plain average humanity. The somewhat shady ComSec company find Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) on the street - a broken down, homeless Scanner, barely aware of his own powers - and recruit him to infiltrate Ironside’s secret army, tutored by splendidly grey-bearded Patrick Magoohan. 

Not quite as theologically scary in implication as those that came before - 'Crimes of the Future', 'Rabid', 'Shivers' - 'Scanners' offers rather more action-orientated fun, heavily coloured by Cronenberg’s vision of untapped human potential unleashed by man’s experiments in technology and pharmaceuticals. There is still that typical Cronenbergian clinical objectivism, which perhaps make the characters less relatable and wanting in general, but Ironside produces great scowls and charisma even so and McGoohan knows how to keep a straight face. 

That legendary early exploding head set piece is still thrilling and genre defining that perhaps not even the prolonging squishy scanner showdown can quite top it. An interview in a gigantic sculptured head also provides a wonderful moment of surrealism, as does a melting phone (Cronenberg even manages an exploding phone booth). The underground group of good scanners seems to present them as the inheritors of the hippie legacy, or at least of counter-culture (they're the homeless, disenfranchised and the artistic, for instance). The malignant corporation is typical of the conspiracy plot that is practically obligatory to this scenario, exploiting and corrupting for crazed ideology. Binding it all, Howard Shore score makes it clear that this is bombast and an updating of old-school horror.

The plotting and execution is thrown around, bordering on stream-of-consciousness and probably will not hold up under close scrutiny, but it is easy to digest and great pulpy horror. Tapping into the sub-genre of psychic-power fantasies - where just force of will can either pour bloody vengeance on all or can better anyone threatening you  - proves a potent resource and Cronenberg mines it for as much head-popping and face-tearing as he can manage. The revelation that Cronenberg could be both cerebral and fun had never quite been so evident. Or maybe you just can’t go wrong with exploding heads.