“We’re young, and when you’re young, every little thing seems so big.”

Justin’s rating: All the best parents couldn’t make it for this movie, sorry

Justin’s review: Out of all of the things younger generations will never understand, at the top of that list is the phenomenon of the Corey Haim and Corey Feldman team-up. Do you know how many movies they were in together? Nine. Nine films. It was quite the era, and most of us developed drinking problems because of it. They did too, and worse.

Dream a Little Dream milks the teen idols (I mean, not literally) for the teenage heartthrob factor. Bobby (Feldman with the most ’80s mullet that ever mulletted) and, er, “Dinger” (Haim with dyed red hair) are punk kids who wear earrings, copious amounts of hair gel, and smoke on the way to school. They don’t give a crap about anything, so obviously they’re the best role model for any up-and-coming Gen Xer.

Bobby especially doesn’t seem to be bothered that he is bounced right out of his body when he smashes into one of his older new age neighbors, Coleman (Jason Robards). Cue one of the most convoluted body swaps ever seen in a body swap flick via a nighttime collision and a mystical tai chi exercise. Coleman ends up in Bobby’s body, Bobby ends up in a dream state, and Coleman’s wife ends up partly in the dream state and partly in the body of Bobby’s crush, Lainie (Meredith Salenger).

If this wasn’t twist enough, Bobby likes the freedom of the dream state and wants to stay there, even if it ends up messing up the lives of three other people.

Dream a Little Dream feels off-kilter from the very start, and for that, I have to lay a lot of blame at the feet of the editor. This is a choppily edited film, with disjointed scenes often abruptly intercut with other scenes and the soundtrack turning on a dime with every cut. And boy is this movie trying to sell you its album. So many songs are crammed into every scene that it’s sometimes distracting.

We also go through the first 20 minutes without any actual plot development or much explanation as to who all of these people are. At one point, we meet two brand-new guys and their dates and some of their bullies and I swear, I was pretty sure the viewer was given no context about any of them. Just a bunch of people the movie starts following, y’know, for some reason.

Body swap movies are already prone to some confusion with two actors assuming a different character’s role. Yet it’s a simple enough formula. You don’t want to monkey around with slapping on more layers, but that’s exactly what this film does. The missing wife, the dream state, nobody telling anyone what’s happening, and Coleman-Bobby trying to navigate high school all the while.

And while you’d expect that all four people would have swapped bodies, it’s really just the one with the other three being missing, partial, or other. You’d also expect that Bobby would want to get back to his body, but… nope? It’s so dang mixed up, and it keeps any comedy at bay as the audience tries to get a handle on the plot.

I don’t even see why the body swap angle was needed. It’s not as if Coleman is related to Bobby, so he doesn’t go through the “I understand you now that I’ve walked in your shoes” journey. And it gets more than a little bit creepy when he spends so much time wooing a teenage girl under the pretense that he thinks his wife is in her head.

At times, this movie really does just want to be a lens aimed at the life of high schoolers, which is where it should have kept its focus without all of these extra characters and fantasy mumbo jumbo. When it does focus down to this, it actually achieves moments of enjoyability.

Then there are just a ton of nonsense tucked into this, such as a part where Corey Feldman’s character, presumably inhabited by a senior citizen, starts looking and dancing like Michael Jackson. Considering Feldman’s involvement with Jackson at the time, you have to wonder who was calling the shots here.

Yet despite a critical drubbing and very low box office, the Two Coreys kept Dream a Little Dream in at least some theaters for the better part of 43 weeks (!) in 1989. That gave it enough time to make an impression on some fans, no doubt, and even snookered in filmmakers to create a direct-to-video sequel a few years later.

I honestly liked about, say, a third of this movie. A competent editor might’ve brought that up to a full 50%, especially if he or she would shave off about 30 minutes from this bloated two-hour runtime. However, the rest of this is a muddled mess with an overly loud soundtrack and many, many unanswered questions. The scales have been weighed, and Dream a Little Dream is found wanting.

…and yes, of course I’m going to do the sequel.

Intermission!

• That is the ultimate ’80s mullet. And possibly wig.
• “I’m flunking every grade in school.” “Marvelous, so am I.”
• This may be one of the more annoying sporadic theme songs
• Ah yes, this was back when you actually cut your clothes to be cool
• OK the red paint and hose trap was pretty good
• And now for some old people sex
• The girl’s dance class doesn’t seem to mind guys leering at them
• Concerned about your kid after an accident? Bring him home and eat some product placement Oreos right in front of him!
• That bathroom really overdid the graffiti
• You can hand in an IOU for homework
• This seems like a long way to walk your lunch tray outside to eat
• “Who’s Freddy Krueger?” “He’s before your time.”
• Coleman trying to act super cool
• This school doesn’t seem to have teachers or coaches
• “I’m every girl’s type”
• Those are some astoundingly distracting lens flairs
• Does Bobby’s mom ever take the curlers out of her hair?
• What’s with all the many fades to white during the SAT scene?
• Yes, let’s give the underage kid some wine
• Hey kids, it’s cool to smoke and drink and wave guns around!
• And we go out on a bizarre end credits dance/song sequence