- Presumably the creators of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension were aiming to make a cult movie, right? I mean, why else would you cast Peter Weller as a half-Japanese rock star/surgeon/particle physicist named Buckaroo Banzai? For what other reason would you ask John Lithgow to play an apparently Italian alien named Dr. Emilio Lizardo? For that matter, why else would you possibly create characters named Bigboote (pronounced Big Boo-Tay, played by Christopher Lloyd), Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), Rawhide (Clancy Brown), Nevada (Pepe Serna), New Jersey (Jeff Goldblum), or Perfect Tommy (Lewis Smith)? When your movie casts Yakov Smitnoff as a National Security Advisor, there's no question in my mind that you're aiming for the midnight movie crowd.
- And as far as midnight movies go, you could do worse than Buckaroo Banzai. It's not a great film and often not even a very good one, but the production is generally competent in ways that usually would not be guaranteed for this type of entertainment. The comic book-inspired set designs and visual effects are pretty good, the music is era-appropriate, and the alien makeup jobs are fairly convincing. None of the acting is wonderful and Lithgow is embarrassingly bad, but you can have some fun counting the "Hey, it's that guy!" actors, including Carl Lumbly, Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya, Ronald Lacey, and William Traylor. Personally, I'm pessimistic that the eponymous hero will return in Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, but the closing credits featuring a dance march through the L.A. Aqueduct provide an appropriately goofy coda to this supremely odd film.
