Attractive and provocative sci-fi about dream research in which gifted psychics are able to project themselves into other people's dreams, either as passive observers or as active participants, with possible curative effect (or, as we soon see, possible destructive effect, too). Not an original idea, but not as yet an overused one, and not entirely spoiled by its ill use here. We shouldn't be too disconcerted that the dreams are rather simplistic in conception: e.g., the President of the United States plagued by nightly nightmares of nuclear holocaust. Nor should we be surprised that they are rather hackneyed in visualization: wide-angle lenses, blurred edges, slow-motion, Caligari-esque geometry. (The director, Joseph Ruben, also directed The Pom-Pom Girls, to which he seems to be paying homage in a brief pep-rally scene.) The real last straw, however, and the point at which the idea must be rescued from its misusers, is the emergence of a U.S. intelligence agent, who, like his colleagues in Firestarter and The Fury and others, is interested in psychic power only as a potential secret weapon. Still, our uncertainty about what can happen in the dream state adds a degree of scariness to the scary scenes; and the climactic showdown between two rival psychics inside a third party's dream manages to reclaim our wandering attention. With Dennis Quaid, Max Von Sydow, Christopher Plummer, and Kate Capshaw. (1984) — Duncan Shepherd
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