bad/awesome flixxx review: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984)

"hey, hey, hey, hey-now. Don't be mean; we don't have to be mean, cuz, remember, no matter where you go, there you are."- Buckaroo

"Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife. Doomed is your soul and damned is your life"- Whorphin

"Will somebody turn off that gosh darn klaxon?"- Whorphin

absolutely one of the weirdest/ most convoluted movies I ever saw. I don't think I ever finished this movie when I was younger. I have memories of certain scenes, but maybe it was a little too hard for me to comprehend at an early age. When recently watching this again, I finally took in all the small pieces and figured out what this was about. Not that it takes a genius to figure this one out, but there are several things going on at the same time and I'm not sure that they do the best job of explaining everything in the movie. But watching it now nearly 20 years later, I get the gist of it, let's see if I can recap it to you sufficiently. So many great players in this wild, made up comic book/sci fi roller coaster including Christopher Lloyd, Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum, & even Vincent Schiavelli star in: THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION!!



"Robocop" himself Peter Weller stars as Buckaroo Banzai in this campy "serial" style send-up. Buckaroo is a genius, neurosurgeon, physicist, rocknroll and comic book star who leads his band the Hong Kong Cavaliers (who also happen to be geniuses and scientists and assassins) on adventures around the globe. This particular adventure pits him against John Lithgow (the mad scientist Lizardo possessed by alien Whorphin) and some of his henchmen who happen to be Red Lectroids from the planet 10 (in the 8th dimension). When the film starts out, Buckaroo is busy as hell, in an operating room, then he's off, straight to the desert to test run his "rocket car" that will only run with his newly developed "interstellar overthruster". He takes off in it passing Mach 1, and then breaks some speed barrier and goes "inside" of a mountain. Then he bursts out only to discover that some creature came out with him, leading him to believe that other creatures exist in other dimensions & they cannot be discovered by normal means. then he splits out to play a rock concert.



At the concert, he stops the show b/c he sees this chick who looks like his dead wife, and it turns out to be her long lost twin sister. He stops her from killing herself, and she comes along for the rest of the flick, whining & wondering the whole way. Then you get some back story on Lizardo. Apparently back in the 30s, he tried to create an overthruster but it didnt fully work, and whilst stuck halfway in another dimension was taken over by Whorphin. Buckaroo gets a phone call at his press conference and these Black Lectoids shock him through the telephone and enable him to see the aliens. Whorphins henchmen attack everyone at the press conference kidnapping professor Ito and grabbing the overthruster. They drive off in a truck that says Yoyodyne Propulsion. From that, The Hong Kong Cavaliers including Perfect Tommy, Jeff Goldblum as a cowboy scientist named New Jersey, and other dudes named Reno Nevada, etc, hack into Yoyodynes computer and figure out that everyone working there was born on the same day, and in the same place, connecting them to the Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast "farce". They figure out that aliens did land, and the "farce" was a coverup. Then they receive a package from a Rastafarian dude who happens to be a Black Lectroid (or goodguy). That's how they piece everything together.



The Black Lectroid has a Star Wars style hologram message that they can watch only by putting the plastic packing stuff with bubbles on their faces and she tells them that if they don't stop the Red Lectroids, she'll blow up something and make Russia think that the US did it, and basically fuel the Cold War into a reality.





Then basically the shit goes down, and there's a watermelon, but nobodys says why, except for they'll tell you later... but they don't. And I'm not gonna tell you the end, you should just watch it. I will say that it says at the end that you should stay tuned for a sequel, but they never made it. They should have. At first I didn't think I was gonna like this, but it turned out to be pretty great. Check it out.