Special effects a pleasure to watch

Press, 2 September 1985, Page 4

Special effects a pleasure to watch

BUCKAROO BANZAI Directed by W. D. Richter Written by Earl Mac Rauch The publicity poster tells you a few things you should know before seeing “Buckaroo Banzai” (Midcity): Red Lectroids from Planet 10 (the bad guys) look like cooked lobsters, while Black Lectroids (the good guys) look like Bob Marley. Buckaroo Banzai stands between you, an inter-galac-tic take-over, and having a nice day. Buckaroo’s army of the Hong Kong Cavaliers is more fearsome than the West Indian pace-bowling attack.

The evil and slimy Dr Lizardo is stranded on Earth from the Eighth Dimension, and he wants to go home. This all sounds very well for a wet Saturday afternoon, but who is this Buckaroo Banzai?

He is the archetypal comic-book hero. Buckaroo has taken the place once held by Gordon when he was the Flash incarnate.

In this age of specialisation, he is a throwback to Renaissance man: a brain surgeon-scientist-rock ‘n’ roll singer, and confidant of the President of the United States, who in between rescuing his girlfriend from various menaces manages to save the world.

If you are still puzzled what this film is about, I doubt if it helps much to know that “Buckaroo Banzai” proposes that Orson Welles’s fictional radio play in 1938 about a Martian invasion was for real.

In that play, Welles claimed that the Martians

were real, only to deny this later. In fact, according to “Buckaroo,” the aliens were not Martians but Lectroids, from the distant Planet 10, who took on human form while searching for the technology needed to destroy the Earth. If your head is not reeling yet, it will be by the end of this film, for it is the most information-packed (mostly rubbish) movie since “Star Wars.”

Technically, “Buckaroo” is a pleasure to watch, with many of the special effects designed by Michael (“Close Encounters”) Fink. It is also a pleasure to see a number of first-rate actors willing to gamble with appearances in such an off-beat innovative film.

Particularly outstanding is John Lithgow as Dr Lizardo, the ultimate mad scientist, who packs an incredible amount of energy into his bizarre performance. We first see him with electrodes connected to his ear lobes and tongue, trying to zap himself back into the Eighth Dimension. From there, his madness knows no bounds.

Neither does Lithgow’s versatile acting career. His last appearance was also way-out — as the spaceship engineer in “2010.” Before that, he appeared as the trans-sexual Roberta Mul-

doon in “The World According to Garp,” the timid lover in “Terms of Endearment,” and the fire ‘n’ brimstone preacher in “Footloose” — an incredible variety of roles in an amazing diversity of films. Christopher Lloyd, who plays another mad scientist in “Back to the Future” at the Savoy, finds time to pop over to the Midcity to take on the form of one of the Red Lectroids; Jeff (“The Big Chill”) Goldblum appears in a Tom Mix outfit; and Peter Weller, as Buckaroo, looks like a muscular Adam Ant. If “Buckaroo” fails to do as well as it deserves, it will probably be because it packs in more information than the average cinemagoer can comfortably digest at one sitting. Also, although many films of this nature openly advertise themselves as spoofs, the public still tends to take them too seriously: “Didn’t understand it. Too much rubbish.” This is the fate that befell Andy Warhold’s 3-D horror satire, “Flesh for Frankenstein,” which was dismissed as a bad serious horror film (there is no such thing as a “serious” horror film) instead of being taken as a hilarious send-up (that is possible).

At the afternoon screening at which I saw “Buckaroo Banzai,” I found, however, that the children had little difficulty following the action, nor were they handicapped by any preconceptions.

Let us hope that they can keep our celluloid-strip hero alive, for his next advertised adventure: “Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League.”