Here's the quintessential PG cool movie. Peter Weller is a brain surgeon / scientist / race car driver / rockstar / piano playing / bandana wearing badass. Only the 80's could bring us a movie like this. Yet, to me, it feels about 30 years ahead of its time.

I think every single person involved in this movie smoked some serious drugs. Jeff Goldblum dresses like Howdy Doody. John Lithgow sells crazy. The baddies look like bootleg versions of Admiral Ackbar. Ellen Barkin plays the Princess to Weller's Mario. Vincent Schiavelli looks like an alien already.  Lewis Smith as Perfect Tommy is cool as fuck. Clancy Brown as Rawhide is a badass motherfucker and my favorite character. The crazy thing…

After watching, and enjoying, Galaxy Quest the other night, and thinking that it could gain status as a brain dead dudeflick, suddenly I thought of my ultimate dudeflick, Buckaroo Banzai.

I first saw it on Pay TV many years ago when I was in my 20’s, shortly after its failed theatrical release, and immediately fell in love. At first, I didn’t quite know why. I’ve never been a comic book or superhero kind of guy, but this film didn’t really fit into those genres. It was something different and unique. Then it hit me .. this is EXACTLY what I used to fantasise about back when I was in elementary school. In fact, my best buddy and I even drew…

I've been ionized, but I'm okay now.
-Buckaroo Banzai

The film was so ahead of it's time that almost 30 years later we still haven't caught up to it. It's absurdest science-fiction that manages to make no sense and complete sense all at once. The characters utter dialogue that baffles the mind, but it's the kind of nonsense that could only be written by someone with actual talent... or a demented mind.

The plot is ridiculously fast paced and doesn't stop for a single moment to give you a breather. Within the first 20 minutes of the film, Buckaroo Banzai performs brain surgery, test pilots an experimental rocket car, discovers an alternate dimension, plays a gig with his band (Buckaroo…

If you were to time-travel to 1984, enter a video arcade,

find the kid playing "Space Invaders,"

and then, at the very moment that Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell" transitions to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" on the arcade speakers,

you injected him with adrenaline

and filled his mouth with Zotz pop-rocks

and told him to improvise the plot for his dream movie...

this is exactly what he would describe:

So, once upon a time there's this brain-surgeon/rocket-scientist/electric-guitar-soloing/gunslinger — a mix of Michael Knight, Simon Le Bon, Han Solo, Deckard, David Bowie, David Byrne, and Max Headroom —

and he has a really fast Mad Max car that can drive right through rock walls into the Eighth Dimension where, when you're moving…

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a cult 80s sci-fi movie following adventurer, brain surgeon, rock musician Buckaroo Banzai and his crime-fighting team, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, who must stop evil alien invaders from the eighth dimension who are planning to conquer Earth.

Jeff Goldblum in an in your face cowboy suit. Aliens in suite. New wave looking rock band fronted by a brain surgeon superhero. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension may have left me questioning what I just watched but I know one thing for certain; I loved every second of it. This movie is outrageous, bizarre, stupid, camp, cheesy and so over the top but those are all the perfect…