![]() Banzai seems to believe that Lizardo’s mistake lay in the insufficient speed at which he was traveling when he activated his overthruster, and thus Banzai’s version of the device is installed in the cockpit of his supersonic jet car. Lizardo evidently got stuck partway through the dimensional barrier, and whatever he experienced while trapped between worlds sent him to a mental hospital where he’s been confined ever since, claiming to be somebody named John Whorfin. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow, of 2010 and Raising Cain), who attempted much the same thing late in 1938, but met with imperfect success. The overthruster was derived from the work of an Italian scientist named Dr. ![]() Another of Banzai’s colleagues, a Professor Hikita (Robert Ito, from Women of the Prehistoric Planet and Fer-de-Lance) who is apparently unique among the Hong Kong Cavaliers in having no role in the band, has been helping him develop a device they call an oscillation overthruster, which will enable the jet car to pass through solid matter by taking a shortcut into the eighth dimension. The real experiment is something more exotic and ambitious, however. So far as the authorities- represented here by a visiting Secretary of Defense (Matt Clark, from The Terminal Man and The Horror Show) and his staff- are aware, all Banzai is doing is testing the inline speed capabilities of the jet car he and his colleagues have built out of a late-model Ford pickup. Instead, this movie hinges upon an experiment that Banzai will begin as soon as he and Zweibel finish operating on a little Eskimo boy’s brain. It’s been a difficult time for Banzai of late, for he recently lost his fiancee, Peggy, to a murder plot organized by his nemeses, the World Crime League- but we can safely forget about that, as neither Peggy nor the World Crime League has anything to do with the present story, existing in the background solely to motivate that sequel that was never made. Sidney Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum, of Jurassic Park and Independence Day), a neurosurgeon nearly the equal of Banzai himself, whom the boss-man is recruiting into the group as the film opens. His bandmates, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, are all scientist-heroes in their own rights, although with one exception, the movie will remain vexingly vague about what exactly it is that they all do. Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller, from Leviathan and RoboCop), son of an American mother and a Japanese father (scientists the both of them), is the sort of man one rarely encounters outside of Mexican wrestling movies: physicist, neurosurgeon, rock and roll star, multimedia pop-culture icon, and (when circumstances require it) international superhero. Amusing in principle, but in practice, all it does is to create undue difficulty for those who might like to take in all of the information being presented, since each version contains potentially significant data that the other omits. While the overall gist is the same, the text on the screen differs markedly in detail from the words of the voiceover ostensibly reading it aloud as it scrolls up the frame. The first hint of that overly strident nuttiness comes during the opening crawl. It would have been a much better movie had Richter and company relaxed a bit, and not tried so desperately hard. ![]() The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai also plays up the other big hazard of the purpose-designed cult film: its carefully calculated eccentricity quickly comes to seem irritatingly forced. ![]() ![]() But like all genuine cult films, it picked up that following gradually and belatedly its initial release was such a cataclysmic failure that it drove the Sherwood production company out of business, instantly scuttling the sequel proudly forecast in the closing credits and creating a thicket of ownership quandaries dense enough to send the VHS tape swiftly out of print and to delay the DVD release for years. True, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension did indeed develop the cult following it seems to have been consciously meant to attract. All they need do is stir the lot together with a few B-list actors and let simmer for 90 minutes or so, and voila! What they’ve failed to realize, of course, is that cult status is merely the afterlife reserved for a few unusually fortunate box-office bombs- a cult film is not something you set out to make if you have half the sense the gods gave a tree frog. Richter, writer Earl Mac Rauch, and producer Neil Canton all gathered together in a kitchen, huddled over a huge mixing bowl beside a cardboard box labeled “Kraft Instant Cult Movie.” Inside the box are packets marked “Doc Savage extract,” “Powdered condensed Commando Cody serial,” “Irony flakes,” and so forth. I have this vision in my head of director W. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension (1984) **½ The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension ![]()
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