Venerable Canuck director Bruce McDonald returns to the big screen with a strange, all you can watch cinema buffet of cult-aspiring dishes best presented as a main course. As a series of small, TV sized bites, this might work, but it becomes quite a muddle as a single entity.
The good: Stephen McHattie. Not surprisingly, McHattie shines in a dual role tour de force of endless crackly Clint Eastwood close ups, and tough guy bad assery.
The bad: Dual roles are never a good idea. It is disruptive, and proves way too clever for it's own good.
More bad: Juliette Lewis, who can be fabulously sensational, is fabulously awful, giddily embracing a despicable role in a volcanic spew of boorish overacting.
There's more. The list is long. Too long. We have Henry Rollins raging. We have a child sex ring. We have a silly vampire. We have a mess.
Brimming with taboo subjects, theatrical violence, absurdist sequences, nightclub lighting, an endless stream of odd characters, "Dreamland" is a prickly stab at "Twin Peaks" cultdom. McHattie almost pulls it off, with a performance for the ages that includes a bizarro Chet Baker impersonation. But it's not enough. What McDonald is trying to achieve here is anyone's guess, so here goes. How about an insider's heroin trip? Let's go with that.
