For this week’s selection I decided to look back at two films from the eighties that, while I certainly enjoyed at the time, never felt I liked them as much as their cult status suggested that I should. I figured that since I was in my mid teens at the time, that would explain this. So I decided I’d check and see what my older more informed eyes would make of them.
The first on my list, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension!, was about the same as I remembered in a mostly good way, that is to say it was, what I heard one person say, “a modern day Doc Savage on acid.” A really fun blend of deliberately stupid technobabble, Rock and Roll and an invasion by aliens from the 8th dimension named John. All of this with a cast of names who would become household names in just a couple of years.
The second was sort of Buckeroo’s spiritual successor in that I hear they recycled a lot of the script for a planned sequel , John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in little China. It was much better than when I first watched it. At the time I completely missed the point that Keith Russell’s Jack Burton was a complete parody of the eighties action hero. I pretty much saw what the poster showed me, a macho white guy waving a machine gun. I completely missed how he has to be told to turn off the safety, nearly drops it from the recoil and then can’t hit the broadside of a barn. It’s funny watching him desperately fumble around for the entire movie while Dennis Dun saves the day.
This was pretty much what I look for in an urban fantasy with a wonderful centuries world hidden beneath the streets of San Francisco. And frankly I think that Victor Wong owned this movie.
