Dreams Come True

Anyone who has viewed Dreams Come True and can bring himself to comment on it at all is indeed quite a special person. I lived and breathed this film for a couple of days many years ago, while transcribing the dialogue for foreign distributors.

The remarkable part of Dreams Come True is that we have characters who can astrally project--how cool!--and they choose to enact the tamest, dullest fantasies. Between the unfortunately low budget and the subpar performances, it is a cruel waste of an interesting idea. Nevertheless, I salute anyone who finishes making a film, let alone gets it distributed. Dreams Come True is bad enough to enjoy for its badness, and that's an accomplishment.

I remember watching this movie growing up. I remember watching it when I was about 13. At this age, a comedy about with astral travelling that contained sex scenes should have been awesome. To my surprise, however, this movie sucked balls. The plot made no sense. The acting was horrible. The sex scene, whilst graphic, turned me on less than that time I saw my neighbours dog eating its own vomit. The makers of this movie should be ashamed. It is hardly surprising that the director of this video went on to a long career of working in the sound department of other movies that no one with half a brain would bother watching. I have no idea why anybody would track down this movie and bother watching it in 2011, but if you do decide that that is want you want to do, maybe consider suicide instead.

This happened to be the first movie I reviewed for my high school newspaper, because it had some kind of four-walling special engagement at my local mall. The youth appeal was clear, with the attractive young couple, and more so, the mystical theme. Before the internet, teenagers in the '80s were fascinated by paranormal possibilities like astral projection, especially if it involved sex scenes.

To be honest, I don't remember it that well, and no longer have that review (which was contained on some kind of floppy disk and printed in crude dot matrix format), but I would see it again out of curiosity. I do remember it being hokey, and even as a salacious teenager myself, it didn't seem so erotic.

I'm now a film professor, so I write about movies for a living, and I will say this: for all the hype around the supernatural, there's not many movies about astral projection. IMDb lists less than 20, most of which you've never heard of, and most of which are only vaguely about the subject (or about another form of extrasensory experience). Maybe it has simply fallen out of fashion, or maybe bad movies about it have made astral projection less appealing.

I was Stan in the movie "Dreams Come True". Stan was the friend that worked at the factory with the main character and ended getting his arm smashed in the machinery and got carried out screaming (where was the ambulance?) The acting in this movie was for the most part pretty poor with mostly local actors from the Fox Valley, Wisconsin. I saw the movie on the big screen. It played 2 nights in 3 theaters and was something special to see yourself on the big screen. I may be bias, but overall, I enjoyed it. Also the soundtrack was the band Spooner, who later became Garbage. My brother, Steve Charlton was also in the movie. He played Swenson the man who comes to the door on crutches to talk with the police.

A trash classic! Basically what we have here is a story about a couple of American teenagers (one male, one female both beautiful people of course) who seem to be psychically linked, in that every time both of them fall asleep, they can inhabit each others dreams and express each others innermost desires... think Mills & Boon meets X-files and you'll be somewhere near the mark. Actually, its more like an unhappy hybrid between one of Ed Wood's famously bad B- movies and a particularly silly episode of Melrose Place, so tacky are the special-effects and so amateurish is the acting. The actors who inhabit (I wouldn't say act in) this flick say their lines like they're reading from cue cards and pout when they're supposed to be showing an emotion, and it comes as no great shock (or loss to the industry) that they have since faded into obscurity. The whole thing is just a laughably misguided mixture of styles that don't go together at all, and the end result is a intriguing curiosity that no doubt will be lapped up by purveyors of so-bad-they're-good films in years to come. I'll probably be the only person who ever comments on this film, but if you are reading and have seen it please get back, it gets kinda lonely round here...