Alex Gardner has advanced mental powers. He mainly uses them to predict the winners of horse races to fund his hedonistic lifestyle, but when the President of the USA starts to have serious nightmares about a post-nuclear apocalypse that are affecting his job, Alex is recruited by a team that has perfected the technology to place people like him into other people's dreams. As Alex's skills progress, he learns that there are dangers in the Dreamscape just as deadly as those in the real world.

Despite the hokey nature of the film's subject matter, DREAMSCAPE has amassed quite a cast. Dennis Quaid shows his leading man credentials as the roguish rebel who learns some responsibility, mainly through the love of a good woman and fear of a snake-headed monster. He's no revelation in the acting stakes, but he has charm in spades and that's far more than the role requires of him. Kate Capshaw is the female doctor he has eyes for and she's very attractive, but she is rather stiff and bland. Fortunately, these two leads are are backed up by heavyweights Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer and Eddie Albert, all of whom take everything in their stride and provide effortless, quality performances that ground the more outlandish elements and make the film more effective. David Patrick Kelly makes for a chilling bad guy as the dreamwalker with no conscience.

The story itself feels no need to find a genre and stick to it. It starts of light and bright, but gradually starts to show its darker side, with horror-inflected dream sequences. The President with nightmares storyline takes on the aspect of a political thriller from the 70s with the dream-linking providing an unusual mode of assassination, and a couple of action sequences are thrown in to support this. The dream sequences vary from comic, to scary, to psychedelic, passing through soft focus romance along the way.

The effects are as varied as the methods used. The stop motion snake-headed monster is the least effective, standing out from the rest of the film like a sore thumb. The lurid colours and imagery of the dreamscapes fit the story well, but are at odds with the more serious elements. A plotline about the evils of nuclear war and political machinations doesn't gel too well with snake monsters and dream warriors.

DREAMSCAPE may be remembered as something of a guilty pleasure from the decade that taste forgot, but in truth it's a bit of a mess that is fitfully entertaining, but never more than that.