| Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, The |
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  (6/10)
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Runtime: 103 |
| Public Rating: 4.86 (56 votes) |
Director: W.D. Richter |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Sci Fi/Action/Comedy |
Year: 1984 |
| Writer(s): Earl Mac Rauch |
| Distributor: 1 |
| Reviewed by: Friday and Saturday Night Critic |
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“The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimesion” is one of the quintessential 1980s cult films. That means that, despite its initial box office failure, it has developed a rabid following on VHS and cable over the years. It also means that, if you didn’t see it between the ages of seven and fourteen one afternoon on HBO, your chances of loving it are slim. And if you weren’t a child or a teenager in the 1980s, you’re chances of enjoying it at all are even slimmer.
That seems to be the way that “cult,” “camp,” and “so-bad-it’s-good” works. If you didn’t live through the times in which a cult film was made—if you don’t have first hand knowledge of when its asinine fashion, music, and ideas about coolness were genuinely cool—there might be a chance you could appreciate it. But you probably won’t come running to its defense the way a true cult follower will. I’ve seen some goofy ‘60s and ‘70s fare, but those weren’t my decade. For truly campy stuff to hit me viscerally, it has to embrace the glossy excess of the ‘80s. My cult film of choice is John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China,” (which features the immortal dialogue “son of a bitch must pay”), although Mike Hodges’ “Flash Gordon” is a good back-up.
So yesterday, after avoiding it many times, I finally saw “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension.” It has what are perhaps the two most important elements to making a cult classic, next to being a financial disaster. It has a terrifically energetic spirit and it has way too many unnecessary details. The first element will get you through an initial viewing of the movie, while the second will keep cult followers coming back time and time again, not only to get the details they’ve missed, but to absorb the major plot points which those details have obscured. It is over a shared knowledge of these details that cult followers will bond. There is an initial glow of excited recognition when two lovers of “Buckaroo Banzai” find each other, followed by conversations that start out with “so what was that watermelon doing?” “Buckaroo Banzai” is also aided by visual effects that are alternately convincing and sorry, and some inspired bad dialogue.
“Pure evil, straight from the Eighth Dimension!”
Enter the improbably named Buckaroo Banzai (“Robocop” Peter Weller), who is, to say the least, multi-talented. Brain surgeon, rock star, theoretical physicist, action hero, and the star of his own line of semi-biographical comic books, he is famous enough to be recognized by strangers, and beloved enough to get away with stealing. Best of all, Buckaroo is also really laid-back, even nonchalant, about his greatness. When congratulated for saving the world, he looks first at his feet and then at his friends and says “I couldn’t have done it alone.”
Buckaroo is joined on his adventures across the Eighth Dimension—or rather swamped—by a menagerie of sidekicks from his rock band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, who in addition to being experts at music and gunplay, are in turns computer wizards, physicians, scientists, and anything else the plot does (or doesn’t) require. They have names like Rawhide, New Jersey, Pinky Carruthers, Reno Nevada, and, everyone’s favorite, Perfect Tommy, who looks so much like Guy Pearce it’s just uncanny. Their look is a bizarre melding of cowboy, samurai, and all the fashion disasters of the 1980s, including red pants, thin ties, jackets with the sleeves pulled up, two belts at once, and awful, awful haircuts. Like Buckaroo, they are also likably casual about their many talents. But this list does not include all the other characters who cross Buckaroo’s path, including his love interest, the Secretary of Defense, the president of the United States, two duck hunters, a black guy named Casper, assorted scientists, his dead wife, alien diplomats, and Yakov Smirnoff. And those are just the good guys.
As for the bad guys…where to begin? In his attempts to use his overthruster or gravitational catapult or whatever this movie’s McGuffin is called to drive his souped-up pickup truck undamaged through a mountain, Buckaroo has unwittingly doomed the world. It seems that a group of alien criminals have been in hiding on Earth since 1938 and just such a McGuffin will allow them to return home, which is Planet Ten. Yes, writer Earl Mac Rauch could have stared at his typewriter and come up with a gibberish word, but instead he choose to call it Planet Ten. A spaceship full of good aliens, or at least less evil aliens, informs Buckaroo that they will destroy the Earth rather than let the alien criminals escape. So the chase is on, to catch the evil aliens, or keep them from stealing Buckaroo’s McGuffin, or from using their own McGuffin…or something. Watching this movie with my friends, we were more than once a little confused as to what was going on. We were delighted to hear Reno Nevada (or perhaps his name was Pecos?) climb out of a secret hatch in the floor and ask Perfect Tommy “Where are we? What’s going on?”
In a stroke of brilliant casting, the head villain is played by John Lithgow, in a performance of scenery chewing, rotten teeth, and bad Italian. He is joined by screen heavies Christopher Lloyd (“Back to the Future,” “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock”), Dan Hedaya (“Commando,” “Blood Simple”) and the very creepy Vincent Schiavelli (“Death to Smoochy”). Buckaroo’s Hong Kong Cavaliers include reliable performers like Jeff Goldblum and Clancy Brown; also thrown into the mix is Ellen Barkin as Buckaroo’s love interest, who is either his dead wife’s twin sister or inexplicable look-alike. Given that she has no real backstory or motivation or anything, and serves no purpose except to tag along until she’s taken hostage, I would say that Ms. Barkin gives an exemplary performance. As Buckaroo himself, Peter Weller holds these things together about as well as they can be held, playing straight and sotto voce.
“The man's been through solid matter, for crying out loud! Who knows what's happened to his brain?”
Director W.D. Richter (who, with John Carpenter, co-wrote “Big Trouble in Little China”), keeps things moving as breathlessly as possible, sometimes too fast for us to absorb everything, learn character names, or even allow certain sentences to be finished. The movie’s major locations include a southwestern desert, Buckaroo’s headquarters, a convention center, a steam-filled warehouse that is home to Yoyodyne Engineering, and a completely-secluded forest that is apparently only minutes outside a New Jersey metropolis. Most of “Buckaroo Banzai’s” interiors look suspiciously similar, as if they were filmed in the same high school or “employee’s only” sections of a shopping mall. The good aliens are essentially a race of space Jamaicans, with spacecraft that look like tree branches, and run in a kind of accelerated goose-step. The movie is packed with hokey ‘80s synth-pop and ends with what I guess is a music video, or something, in which Buckaroo and the rest of the cast meet up in, I dunno, a parking lot, and strut around in step. And Buckaroo himself, despite access to a seemingly limitless amount of money, uses the same circa 1885 six-shooters you would expect Wyatt Earp to carry. As always, I mention none of this to criticize the movie, but to give you an idea of its crazy spirit.
Like all cult films, “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension” is supposed to grow on you the more you see it. Okay. Life might not be long enough to see “Buckaroo Banzai” more than once, but you never know. In the words of Buckaroo himself: “I’ve been ionized. But I’m okay now.”
Finished October 5th, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night
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 Printable Version
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This review (except run time) refers to the EXTENDED VERSION. Starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, Lewis Smith, Christopher Lloyd, Dan Hedaya, Clancy Brown, Matt Clark, Carl Lumbly, Robert Ito, Ronald Lacey, Vincent Schiavelli, and Rosalind Cash
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