Planet 10 sounds like a pretty good idea right now
Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 9:07PM Tonight my life (okay, my mood) was saved by the inexplicable The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension! Inexplicable because I just can't imagine anyone with money actually agreeing to finance a movie that's aggressively weird, chock full of in-jokes and pretty much guaranteed to not appeal to a mass audience.
It's not easy to encapsulate in a quick synopsis. There are some evil aliens called Lectroids who steal something Buckaroo (who is a physicist/neurosurgeon/racecar driver/rockstar) has been working on called the overthruster so they can go back to their home planet and reconquer it, only the good Lectroids get in touch with Buckaroo...
What matters are the details. For instance, all the Lectroids are named John Something, as in John Bigbooty (pronounced Big-boo-TAY), John Smallberries, John Yaya, in order to fit in seamlessly on Earth. The President looks exactly Orson Welles. John Lithgow as the head rebel, Dr. Emilio Lizardo, is about as out of control as it's possible to get on a movie set. The rest of the cast is full of brilliant folks like Christopher Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli who never got the kind of recognition they should have. And the writing is full of gems, like this call and response between Lithgow in full Hitlerian mode and a factory full of Lectroids:
"Where are we going?" bellows Lithgow.
"Planet 10!"
"When?"
"Real soon!"
I saw it a couple of times when it came out, in theatres that were nowhere near half full. Which was too bad for the writer and director, and for the producer.
But its distastrous run somehow just deepened my love for it.
buckaroo banzai, movies
Reader Comments (2)
My friends and I were obsessed with this movie in high school. It was so bad, it was good. I saw it again recently on TV and it hadn't lost it's good/badness in 25 years.
Big-bootee/Big-booTAY still makes me laugh.
I was helping my 9 year do some research for Japan and so for fun I thought that I would google Buckaroo Banzai, which was one of those cult movies that I watched in high school. So, to my surprise I ended up in this blog.
You know, just thinking about the movie brings a smile to my face. That and remembering a friend who's name begins with A trying to explain his "positive aura" and how he was born in another galaxy to my girlfriend (now my wife).