In Total Recall, you could argue most of the movie is a dream, though they left it somewhat ambigous.
Blue Velvet you can argue to be little more then a dream.
in Last Temptation of Christ wasn’t Christ’s marriage and fatherhood etc. all just a dream while he was on the cross ?
It was indeed.
Another one that I just remembered:
Boxing Helena (the stupidest!)
Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window
Donnie Darko
That’s how I saw it. And that’s just what I was thinking of.
The original Invaders from Mars. One of the scariest movies I remember from when I was a kid.
My favorite is in the comedy Top Secret!.
Val Kilmer has someone run up to him and ask him if he’s ready for The Big Test. He suddenly realizes that he hasn’t studied for it!
Then he wakes up, and realizes with relief that It Was Just a Dream, and he hasn’t missed The Big Test. He’s just being tortured by Nazi/Communists (don’t ask). When he realizes that he’s only being tortured, and he hasn’t missed the Test, he breaks out in a big grin.
IIRC, that was the one with the party. At the end, Neil is being beaten up by a bunch of Vivyan’s friends. Then he wakes up and realizes it was all a dream. They show him walking around his room as the end credits role. Then at the very end, he wakes up again and is still being beaten up.
Two that sort of count:
Roseanne. Not a dream but a fiction within a fiction. Or at least it would be if the revalation of the last episode had actually happened. It didn’t though. Just like the last season didn’t happen. Not even as a dream.
The Third Policeman. Also not a dream but…something much worst. Read the book and find out! (Actually I mention it mostly because I want people to read the book.)
Also The Twighlight Zone …probably more than one episode but the one I’m thinking of is where the Earth is falling into the Sun, everyone is doomed and it’s horribly horrible hot. Then the main character wakes up to find she was only dreaming of being hot because she had a fever and is delighted to find it’s wonderfully cool
because the Earth is falling away from the Sun and everyone is doomed!!!
In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it was suggested that the events of the entire series were just a fantasy in the mind of an autistic child.
At the end, I believe it turned out to be the main character’s paranoid/psychotic delusion so, technically, I’m not sure that counts.
The real kicker is that by tracing the web of crossovers, you can show that most of modern American television is part of that fantasy.
Do you think the movie* Jacob’s Ladder * counts as “just a dream”?
Yep. One of my favorite episodes. A gem.
And I dropped in to name that one. I don’t see how you can count it as anything else.
If I remember correctly, Ira Levin’s godawful ‘Son of Rosemary’ novel ends with the implication that the original ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ was, in fact, all a dream. That’s how I remember it, anyway…I’ll be glad to be corrected if I’m wrong.
“Son of Rosemary.” A horrible book. Really horrible.
In Friday the 13th (the original). The one girl who survived (Tracy? Amy?) is taken to the hospital…then the next scene they show she is on a canoe floating in Crystal Lake and all is calm, all is bright…BUT THEN OH MY GAH! JASON VORHEES COMES UP OUT OF THE WATER AND PULLS HER OUT OF THE BOAT AND TRIES TO DROWN HER AND OH MY GAH!!!..oh, she was just dreaming.
Oh I forgot…
Brazil . The ending that is.
And of course** The Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend** .