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The 80’s were certainly a creative time for movies. Not just in the case of horror, as we’ve seen several times on just this list alone, but for the realm of action/adventure as well. Whether it was Indiana Jones fighting cultists and Nazis in a bygone age, Schwarzenegger saving peoples of a dystopian future with only his muscles, Luke Skywalker fighting the evil Empire or Warwick Davis fighting evil sorceresses, it seems like the film industry much more more willing to finance weird crap than they are today. Maybe it was the result of the new generation of directors having grown up on such weird stuff their nostalgia, or pop culture had shifted towards more fantastical projects, just as music suddenly went total synth and everything went neon and day-glo. It’s only speculation, but as weird and occasionally hokey as those types of movies seem in hindsight, I can’t help but like them. They just feel different than watching modern movies, and I don’t know if it’s nostalgia or not because I’m too young to have grown up with them. Probably nostalgia.
One such ‘weird action’ film is a movie that I hadn’t seen in years, but often recommended to others anyway: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension, directed by W.D. Richter. A slick 80s love note to Doc Savage and other heroes of pulp fiction, Peter Weller (Robocop, Naked Lunch) plays Buckaroo Banzai, a half Japanese experimental physicist, brain-surgeon, rock star and the subject of his own comic book. Along with bandmates/colleagues the Hong Kong Cavaliers, Buckaroo is the only guy on Earth who not only pushes the boundaries of science into strange and exciting new directions, but can also sell out any club on the East Coast while doing it. Their latest success is the actualization of a decades old experiment by their friend Professor Hikita, total and sustained entry into the mysterious plane known as the 8th Dimension. The price of discovery can be high however, and it seems like simple little experiment might have greater implications than Banzai and the HKC anticipated. Things like age-old conspiracies, Hikita’s old partner Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow), and evil Bokchoys from Planet 10, to name a few. Saving the Earth might seem like a monumental task for some people,but it’s just another day in the life of Buckaroo Banzai.
Buckaroo Banzai is not a movie meant to be taken seriously. It’s a tribute to a time when the heroes were the idealized forms of man and sci-fi was more ‘fiction’ than ‘science’, and they have a lot of fun playing around with the concept. Of course when you have so many balls in the air it’s kind of hard to juggle, and I think the movie does stumble when it comes to character development, as well as establishing the romantic subplot. It’s a weird 80s adventure movie through and through, and if you’re the kind of person who enjoys weird 80s adventure movies (like me), then you might like to watch this movie yourself this Halloween.
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