Review of Dreamscape

Introduction

Although having an interesting storyline and a decent cast this film sadly falls into the “oh yeah I saw that ages ago and quite liked it” only to watch it again and embarrassingly admit “well it was good when I was young”. Yes I’m afraid it has dated badly. The acting seems a bit ropy, not helped by the script and the blue screen effects are painfully obvious and fake. The stopmotion effects are (even as a fan of stopmotion) pretty bad and comes across as cheap but not necessarily cheerful. One good thing though is that the nunchucka sequence is in by some miracle of non-censorship by the BBFC.
Apart from feeling a bit cheap in places there are some nice ideas here and if you can ignore some of the bad points im sure some of you may actually enjoy this film.

Video

Well what can I say? Probably the worst R2 release yet as far as picture quality goes. An exceptionally dirty, damaged and generally worn print which obviously needed a serious clean up and restoration before being released. Colours bleed all over the shop and are very muted throughout, the black detail levels are consistently appalling and motion artefacts appear everywhere.
Adding to the shame is the fact that its presented in a 1.85:1 non-anamorphic ratio and you basically have one big stinker on your hands. I wasn’t exactly expecting a pristine print here, considering its age and low budget, but come on, this is just disgraceful.

Apparently the region 1 version has had a full video restoration with full 5.1 remix, just to add salt to the wound.

Audio

Pretty much the same as the video section. A really poor stereo track (you’ll think its mono as I couldn’t here any separation) containing hissy and sometimes harsh dialogue which does the film no favours. Needless to say a serious lack of low end bass, very compressed and un-dynamic. Overall you wonder why they bothered.

Features

A few cast and crew notes along with a trailer. There’s also a so called ‘montage’ of scary bits from the film which needless to say is appalling and a slide show of the snakeman mutation which contains about 10 slides at most and even these are really bad quality. This has got to be a wind up, I swear.

Conclusion

I can remember watching this film when I was young on Tv and to be honest I rather enjoyed it. The idea of untapped supernatural powers In a person has always appealed to me and I’ve kind of got a nostalgic soft spot for the films of this genre, the Fury, Scannners and to some extent Carrie. Watching it now though I feel a bit disappointed. Its funny how you only remember the best things from the past. I remember when…….…. Sorry wandered off there for a second.
Maybe it was the awful quality that did it. Yeah I’ll blame it on that.

Its such a shame that this disk is so poor. I’m sure there are people out there like me who have fond memories of this film and would like to own a decent version. Sure the film and acting are a bit ropy ,(apart from Max Von Sydow who is always superb even in the most unforgettable of films) and the effects are very 80’s and don’t stand up well today at all, but there is a interesting theme behind the film and if you think you may be interested it maybe worth a look. Just don’t buy this version.

Basically if you want this DVD buy the Region 1 version which has been restored and fully remixed and even contains a commentary. Sorry but Region 2 loses again.