Buckaroo Banzai

One of those cult movies that I thought I had seen along the way but as it turns out I never had is The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. I noticed recently that it was available on one or another of the streaming services (I think Pluto TV, but I'd have to look it up), so I sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review on it here.

Peter Weller plays Buckaroo Banzai, a polymath who is among other things a surgeon and an inventor. He also leads a music combo, the Hong Kong Cavaliers. As the movie starts, he's working on a device that would allow people to move through solid material, although why the solid material wouldn't harm them by going through them is a question not quite answered. The experiment is more or less a success, albeit with side effects.

Meanwhile, in a prison/insane asylum is Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow). He had been working on the same sort of invention back in 1938, but suffered the same side effect as Banzai, which was to wind up traveling through a place called the 8th Dimension. It turns out as well that there's a Planet X beyond the solar system, and aliens from there have been using the 8th Dimension as well. Lizardo was attacked by the aliens and turned violently insane, while Buckaroo only brings one back to earth.

It's a big mistake, as the other aliens, now understanding that at least one earthling has the same technology as them, decide they need to keep the rest of earth away from that technology. So they kidnap Buckaroo, although not after he was able to find his murdered wife's long-lost twin sister Penny (Ellen Barkin). The aliens have in fact already reached earth, where they set up a shell company called Yoyodyne in New Jersey -- the same location Orson Welles used in his radio version of The War of the Worlds, a fact that is actually a plot point in the movie -- and have set about disguising themselves as humans, in an attempt to get back to the 8th Dimension and their home planet.

The rest of the Cavaliers, including a very young Jeff Goldblum as "New Jersey", set out to find Buckaroo and keep a hold of that interdimensional mechanism so that the aliens can't get it and take over the earth.

It's easy to see why Buckaroo Banzai has a cult following, and why it's the sort of movie that was not a box office hit when it was first released in 1984. It's clearly not going to appeal to everybody, and even for the sort of people that might be naturally predisposed to like a movie like this, the plot is a bit of a mess. It feels as though the writers had a whole bunch of ideas, but no idea how to put them all together in a coherent matter, so they just threw everything against a wall to see what stuck. Sometimes, the silliness works, but not always.

Still, Buckaroo Banzai is the sort of movie that should probably be seen once if only to understand why it has such a cult following.