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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