It’s basically a movie about being on the outside of something nerdy with decades of continuity and trying to play catch up.
#Backaroo bonzia full
The movie is full of lines that suggest that there are decades of Buckaroo Banzai stories and movies and novels and comics out there that are being referenced, when in reality it’s just this movie (and a few pieces of tie-in media that came out afterwards). And in that universe, Buckaroo Banzai is the biggest thing ever.
This movie plays like it fell into our world from an alternate dimension, one perhaps where Superman was never published and old pulp heroes like Doc Savage and the Shadow expanded to occupy the place superheroes now take in our culture. Hanoi Xan doesn’t even appear for the entire run-time. And already, you have fallen into this movie’s trap.
Unfortunately, as Rawhide solemnly tells us, Buckaroo’s father was killed when the Overthruster exploded, thanks to the nefarious sabotage of “Hanoi Xan”.ĭue to the emphasis Rawhide places on that name, you of course suspect that Hanoi Xan will be our villain. Okay, so after the opening narration explains that the movie we are about to see has been declassified by the Buckaroo Banzai foundation we are told in voiceover by Rawhide (Clancy Brown) that Buckaroo Banzai was the child of a Japanese physicist and an American scientist who designed a machine called an “Oscillation Overthruster”, designed to phase through solid matter. If I recount this plot, I’m only giving it the attention it so clearly craves. This movie is like a naughty schoolboy who sprays graffiti across the front of the school solely so that the very serious principal has to call his parents into his office to tell them in a very serious voice that their son sprayed the world TITTYBOLLOCKS across the façade. I’m almost loathe to recap the plot because that means being the butt of a joke. Or possibly a “watch under the influence of hallucinogens and then found a religion” movie. It’s a “crack open a few beers with some rowdy friends” movie. It’s not a “watch at home alone on a cloudy afternoon” movie. And I have to confess, my first watch through I was very conscious of what I like to call “The Rocky Horror” effect, the sensation that you would really be enjoying the movie you are watching if you weren’t alone and stone cold sober. You are either in on the joke, or you aren’t. This is a CULT film, engineered to be so from the atoms making up the film stock upward. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8 th Dimension is what happens when a lot of very smart, very talented people decide to take twenty million dollars of someone else’s money and have as much fun as it is possible to have legally. During the “Making of” there’s a moment where director WD Richter is asked what the movie is about and responds with a deep sigh and a muttered “Oh God…” To make matters worse, Planet 10 warrior queen John Emdall has sent her Lectroid legions against Earth with a brutal ultimatum.As a general rule, I don’t watch the “Making Of” features of the movies I review, because:Ī) The movie should be able to stand alone as a discrete work without additional media required to appreciate it.īut after… experiencing the subject of this review, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8 th Dimension, I felt that I might need to read the manual. Still mourning the losses of his beloved Penny Priddy and his surrogate father Professor Hikita, Buckaroo Banzai must also contend with the constant threat of attack from his immortal nemesis Hanoi Xan, ruthless leader of the World Crime League. The book is being written by Rauch, but "told" to him by Reno Kid, one of the fictional members of the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Nearly twenty years later, that's finally happening.
#Backaroo bonzia series
And this is actually the completion of a second promise, too: when screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch wrote a foreword for a reprint of the novelization of the first movie, which came out in 2002, Rauch teased that the adventures of Buckaroo Banzai would be continued in a series of novels. Now that promise of a sequel is being fulfilled decades later with the publication of a new book called – you guessed it – Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, et al: A Compendium of Evil. I know it was very strongly implied, but I guess the first movie's ending never technically promised that Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League would be a film.
0 kommentar(er)
