I spent a majority of this movie asking "what the hell am I watching?" but asking that with a smile on my face. "Buckaroo Banzai" is a perfect cult movie, a mish-mash of genres with outlandish characters, a scattered plot, an absurd script, and wonderfully bad special effects.

Buckaroo Banzai is a scientist/inventor/surgeon/rockstar. His parents were scientists attempting to create a way to pass through solid matter. A suspicious accident kills them both, and years later Buckaroo is able to successfully drive through a mountain. In doing so, he disrupts the balance between our dimension and the 8th Dimension. Evil aliens, hiding on Earth, want the technology, while good aliens try to work with humans to save the planet.

The casting is insane: Peter Weller stars as Buckaroo. John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Lloyd all have fun supporting roles. Ellen Barkin looks pretty damn hot despite bad 80s hair and clothes. There are also a bunch of fantastic character actors like Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya, Clancy Brown and Jonathan Banks. Even Yakov freakin Smirnoff has a cameo. It borders on distracting to see so many faces that make you say "hey, that's THAT guy" but it's still enjoyable to see them all throwing themselves into such a ridiculous concept.

Balancing out the energetic cast is a totally disjointed script and plot. At times it felt like the writers had an outline with basic plot points they wanted to introduce and expand upon, but gave up after the introduction. It seemed the movie could have been four hours long but over half just got left on the cutting room floor, leaving a skeleton with potential to go in different directions, but ending up a pile of bones.

How do you really judge a B-movie? The campiness is part of the charm. In times like this I tend to go with memorability. Is this movie going to stick with me, am I going to make random references to it, am I going to tell friends "you gotta watch this!" ...yes, yes, and yes.

 

 

On the [Celluloid Hero] scale, "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension" gets a 7 out of 10.

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