’90s basic cable late-night thrillers get raunchy resurrection in Dream Team

Photo by Whitney Horn, courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures

It’s a bit of inside baseball, but one of the easiest parts of being a film critic in the era of omnipresent streaming is the ability to recommend a film that doesn’t require a trip to an expensive theater. The subject of today’s writing is a film that absolutely was built for you to stumble upon late at night, alone, and wonder wtf happened with the algorithm to lead you to this point. While the flick is currently in a limited theatrical release, the closest screening to KC is down in Austin, and you’ll be just fine—perhaps better off—when this comes to VOD.

Dream Team is the latest film from Special Affects—the West Coast art duo of Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn. Their brand of cinema blends lo-fi 16mm photography, dreamy electronic music, extended existential musings, and a signature brand of absurdist humor that’s more “huh” than “ha ha.” Their latest is a sci-fi/comedy that scans as a genre experiment that does intriguing work with mood but doesn’t deliver much else.

The two leads are a team of INTERPOL agents, played by the dynastic French film staple Esther Garrel and ambient musician Alex Zhang Hungtai. The pair task themselves with parsing apart an illegal smuggling operation based around a collection of sea coral samples that squirt out potentially lethal toxic emissions. There’s a pile of dead bodies, but these leads aren’t particularly interested in solving the crime so much as they delight in floating through situations and interactions, untethered by anything more than the most threadbare narrative. Beyond the interspecies mystery of psychic coral, there’s also a sexually suggestive scientist, an invisible coworker with a vindictive streak, and a basketball team doing team-building at a winery.

Billed as a comedic homage to ’90s late-night cable-thrillers, this mood piece gets within the right genre quadrant but seems unwilling to stick to any kind of consistency that would propel the story forward. As a riff on the budget softcore skin flicks you might’ve caught on HBO in your youth, it loves to dip its toes into the kind of hazy horniness and barely conscious acting that gives it the right slurring, cough syrup dreaminess. It gestures at delivering on that retro sense of nonsensical horniness that was at once transgressive yet delighting in dumb flirtation.

Photo by Whitney Horn, courtesy of Yellow Veil Pictures

Dream Team starts out strong, with disconnected V.O. and a disarming synth vibe with a mix of bizarrely paced scenes and fades between fish and the world of the film. It should start to work over time by focusing on some of these odd characters and locales, but Dream Team is uninterested in ever coming back to earth. While the mood is managed well, it’s difficult for the momentum to manifest in a manner that makes this worth your full attention. This seems all to be by design, with DT built as a macabre background object—if you never looked directly at it, you’d be sure it was a normal film and not a delightfully unhinged tone poem.

It’s odd to see this sort of Adult Swim adjacent production that self-describes as being played for laughs but never driving the car in that direction. This is, perhaps, to blame on the framing, that I would go in investing my attention in thinking there was a send-up of actual softcare staples, instead of being prepared to appreciate DT for the weightless electric hum that it feels comfortable remaining centered on.

I don’t regret watching it, but I do see the version of this that would’ve hooked me. The title cards still remain to divide this feature into individual episodes, of a story that was once envisioned as a series. Dream Team, in webseries form with dosages doled out over time, would’ve been easier and wackier to digest instead of one 91-minute chunk that starts to drag after an hour. Still, I dug the experience, and it’s doubtful you’ll encounter anything like this again this year.