• Directed by Jackie Garth
• Written by Vernon Lumley
• Starring
  • “Cassandra Leigh” (aka Lisa Boyle)
  • Patrick Ahern
  • Kristen Knittle
  • Timothy Di Pri
  • Mark Sherman
• Produced by Karen L. Spencer
• Executive produced by Alan B. Bursteen

And now, the sci-fi-flavored softcore flick that answers a question near and dear to all our hearts: What if Freddy Krueger had breasts?

Our protagonist, such as he is, is psychology grad student Grant (Patrick Ahern), who’s something of a workaholic with his current project: A method to stimulate lucid dreaming on command, allowing dreamers to take control of their dreams and thus work through subconscious traumas and mental roadblocks. And Grant’s got a few of them himself to work through. We first meet him on what he hopes to be a romantic evening with his fiancee Susan (Robbie French). Unfortunately, she’s mostly there to break up with him, citing his unavailability thanks to his devotion to his work. Their breakup quickly turns to breakup sex, but in the middle of the series of long and lingering skin shots (this is first and foremost a softcore film, after all), a hooded woman in dominatrix gear (Patricia Skeriotis) steps out of the shadows. This “evening” is really a dream; Susan left Grant weeks ago after sleeping with his best friend. The dominatrix crawls all over Grant, taunting and enticing him, until he runs out of the room into the mist of his dreams.

Unfortunately, he ends up only in a further dream, this time on a bus stop bench, and the dominatrix follows him further, again throwing herself all over him and almost seducing him before he can concentrate and wake himself up. For real, this time.

And I’m one “Little Red Riding Hood” joke away from going to hell.

Grant is of course intrigued by this recurring figure in his dreams – tonight hasn’t been the only occasion on which she’s presented herself. As he says into his tape recorder, “Obviously, this woman represents something from my past.” Because that’s what psychologists are trained to think, you know. At least he doesn’t start linking her to his mother…

So. On to his grand experiment. He posts notices on the bulletin boards around campus looking for volunteers, and has a cute-meet with September (Lisa Boyle, here working under her frequently-used pseudonym of “Cassandra Leigh”). She even remarks on it; when he turns around and accidentally knocks her books out of her arms, she calls it a “coffee-commercial moment.” Luckily, the rest of the characters in the movie don’t take this as their cue to label every cliche or derivative scene to come.

That night, he ends up with three volunteers in the sleep lab: Dani (Kirsten Knittle), a hot but repressed brunette; Troy (Timothy Di Pri), a brash motormouth; and September herself. September quickly reveals herself to be psychic, because that’s the best way to set people at ease; she knows the names of the other two volunteers, and about the milk and cookies Grant hasn’t brought out yet, and that Grant was about to play them an audio tape.

Which he does; he is, he tells them, the kind of person who talks in his sleep and describes what’s going on. (Maybe that’s the real reason Susan broke up with him, because that’d be DAMNED annoying.) Why’s he playing it for them? Ostensibly to “level the playing field” by sharing his own intimate dream life, so they’ll feel more open about revealing their dreams to him. In reality, it’s more because every dream in this movie is a sexual one, and it’s been a few minutes since we’ve seen breasts. In this dream, Grant finds a blonde washed up on the beach, and she expresses her gratitude for his attention by, you know… Until she abruptly turns into the dominatrix.

One word, people: “Chafing.”

So Grant then interviews each of the volunteers privately, to find out what recurring sexual dreams they’re trying to overcome and what it might mean in their lives. Dani dreams frequently of crawling into bed with her foster brother from her teen years, and being discovered by her foster mother (a scene that could easily have been icky, except that the actors involved are all at least in their mid-twenties); the dream is tied up with Dani’s treatment at the hands of her foster mother, who was religious and therefore of course repressive and sex-negative. Troy has a recurring dream about a blonde from high school, who strips down and lies seductively on a bed which turns out to be surrounded by an invisible forcefield; this is the girl who tricked him into stripping in her bedroom and admitting his virginity before all of his friends poured out of the closet, flashbulbs a-blazing.

In other words, these folks have “issues.”

September? Oh, she doesn’t have any dream issues. She mostly came for Grant, because she’s seen him around campus and thinks he’s hawt – and because she can tell he’s having serious dream issues of his own. Okay she cheated; while he was interviewing the other two, she sneaked a peek at his notebook. But she’s still psychic; she knows, for instance, that the name of the dominatrix is “Devora.” And that she’s bad news. He gets a second opinion by looking up the Library of Congress on his proto-Internet connection, and seeing Devora mentioned in the abstract of an old book of ghost stories as the soul of a vengeful prostitute who traps men through their own lustful desires.

By this time, Grant has both Dani and Troy hooked up to his monitoring equipment and has sent them off to dreamland. Thanks to Grant’s lucid dreaming gimmick, a series of musical tones he broadcasts into their headsets when they begin REM sleep, he allows them to take control of their dreams: Dani makes her foster mother go away so she won’t interrupt quality time with her foster brother (which isn’t even a little bit icky), and Troy manages to make it onto the bed with the blonde and squeak the bed springs.

Isn’t that always the way when you date a mime?

Unfortunately, once everyone’s done with REM sleep and enters the deeper restful phase, Grant nods off in his chair. When he wakes up, September’s there, coming on to him. He gives into to his (surprisingly violent) desires, and presto! It’s not September, it’s Devora, and Grant is caught!

Now September the Psychic Girl wakes from her (unmonitored) sleep and rushes into the control booth to find Grant unwakeable. So she proposes the only thing she can: Shared dreaming. Huh? Yeah, Grant’s mentioned “shared dreaming” a couple of times, almost as an afterthought. He seems to think that once he’s got this lucid dreaming thing down, entering other people’s dreams will be a piece of cake. Any wonder that he hasn’t been granted his degree yet? But September’s also up to speed on shared dreaming, so she explains it all to the other two, and golly, it seems so simple! All they have to do is agree to meet at the dream version of someplace they know well, and then walk through a door whose appearance they’ve agreed upon while waking, and presto! They’ll be in a third person’s head!

And that’s how it works. September and Dani meet in the library in their dream (they leave Troy out in the real world to monitor the equipment, mostly because men don’t stand up to Devora too well), then walk through a door, and presto, they’re in a dungeon where Devora has been brainwashing Grant into believing that he doesn’t need love or anything. They grab him and convince him to come with them out of the dream, but Devora shows up and nabs September, so now SHE can’t get back out.

Are you ready for the hawt girl-beside-girl action?

Which means that Grant has to take some sleeping pills to get back INTO his dream and rescue September before she falls prey to Devora’s lesbian wiles. (You knew they had to show up here somewhere, right?)

Taken as a whole, this movie is… interesting. No, not exactly that. In most respects, it’s completely perfunctory, in story, execution, and acting. It radiates that version of “cheap” which doesn’t look impoverished so much as afflicted with disinterest, as if everyone involved were trying to maintain enough interest to shoot for the lofty goal of adequacy. Suspension of disbelief isn’t even an issue; none of the sets have more than three walls, every doorway leads either to darkness or an obscuring glow, and the lighting is straight from the guidebook on How to Make Your Set Look Exactly Like a Set.

But there is a creative tension, you could say; or maybe a tension between a creative impulse and the genre. If there’s anything that distinguishes the softcore output of the various Charles Band labels and their successors (the prodco Twilight Entertainment was a subsidiary entity of The Kushner-Locke co.), it’s a commitment to “sex-positive” attitudes, avoiding the standard “sex for plot tension” device of the so-called erotic so-called thrillers. Here, though, the greenlit premise is one that practically demands a sinister sexuality; Devora is, after all, the ghost of a prostitute who uses sex to entrap men in their dreams. The only ways to defuse this dichotomy are (a) to load the movie up with the sexy dreams of the study participants — and even they are only marginally more sex-positive than not, given that half of them deal with frustration and emotional baggage; and (b) to make sure that Devora isn’t actually spooky during sexual encounters, and barely spooky at all.

It’s a bizarre tightrope for any feature to try to walk, as the best case outcome would be a resounding blandness. And even there, the cliches of the horror genre linger in the mind of the viewer, demanding accomodation. The final scene is, of course, hot “getting to know you” action between Grant and September, and the movie feels almost unfinished when it fades out without a final obligatory “shocker.”

Uh huh, layin’ some brick, oh yeah… (I have no idea what that means.)

As a motion picture, then — you know, by standards of narrative tension and story dynamics — it’s probably a better movie than something like The Exotic House of Wax (1996), which has just enough of a story premise to springboard an overwhelming succession of sex scenes. On the other hand, the point of a movie like this isn’t the satisfaction of a story well told, but a different kind of stimulation and satisfaction; and by those standards, Dreammaster could only be a success to those viewers determined to ignore any story bits and concentrate wholly on the skin.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 12
• pasty male butts: 1
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 10
• ominous thunderstorms: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
  • (Patricia Skeriotis – Devora – did some voice work on the videogame Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, but I don’t wanna count that)