The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension

A state-of-the-art spaceship flying at the speed of light without narrative coordinates, Buckaroo Banzai is the very oddest good movie in many a full moon.

Richter's comic genre hybrid comes complete with its own mythology, and team of established superheroes, and is curiously appealing.

It violates every rule of storytelling and narrative structure in creating a self-contained world of its own.

Buckaroo Banzai may well turn out to be a pilot film for other theatrical features, though this one would be hard to top for pure, nutty fun.

Wonderfully fun, albeit markedly chaotic and incoherent.

The vast, delirious joke of W.D. Richter’s sci-fi comedy... is that it plays like the 189th issue of a comic book that actually has no prior issues.

Unmistakably tongue-in-cheek, the movie follows Buckaroo (Peter Weller) to the frontier of ultra-hip sci-fi parody. John Lithgow gets a chance to pull out all the stops as a mad scientist, and when things are funny they’re very much so.

Too wacky and spaced out for its own good.

The movie makes such large demands on one’s powers of concentration and yet, when all of its threads have been followed and its oddities assimilated, all one is left with is a junk construction.

Dense and complex, this beloved 1984 cult film hits the ground running with its text-based prelude and just doesn't stop, never making an expected choice or pausing to hold the viewer's figurative hand.