![]() ![]() ![]() His performance isn’t “so bad it’s good.” It transcends good and bad, and all other notions of quality besides. Globally feted physicist (and part-time neurosurgeon and rock star) Buckaroo Banzai takes part in an experiment to drive through solid matter in a jet-car powered with his patented Oscillation Overthruster cinematic precursor to Doc Brown’s Flux Capacitor. John Lithgow says “big booty” a lot, mispronouncing the name of one of his minions, played by Christopher Lloyd.Įvery single time Lithgow is on screen, he’s giving full, one thousand percent nutball quality. ![]() John Lithgow must have been worried on-set that he’d make a total ass of himself, but then he ended up the best part of a movie that features baby Jeff Goldblum dressed like this: Except Jupiter, which I didn’t like, was hamstrung by trying to be a bit too shiny and Hollywood for the low-budget schlock it wanted to emulate, while Buckaroo firmly commits to being batshit insane across the board.) (In fact, Jupiter Ascending really is Buckaroo Banzai for the 21st century. He makes Eddie Redmayne in Jupiter Ascending look like a master of understatement. He just fucking goes for it, and it’s beautiful. While everyone else got to stand around saying quasi-deep shit like “No matter where you go, there you are,” Lithgow got a strong Russian accent and facial tics galore. John Lithgow does not get to be weird in a cool way. The opening clip is of him immediately post-possession:īuckaroo Banzai is sci-fi pulp serial crossed with a Saturday morning cartoon, so it’s weird across the board-Buckaroo himself is a “brilliant neurosurgeon” who, “growing dissatisfied a life devoted solely to medicine… roamed the planet studying martial arts and paticle physics, collecting around him a most eccentric group” of rock star scientists-but most of the characters in it get to be weird in a cool way. We print the highest quality buckaroo banzai t-shirts on the. In order to get back home, Whorfin-now inhabiting Lizardo’s body-must acquire a “oscillation overthruster” built by Banzai.Įmilio Lizardo/John Whorfin is fucking nuts. Shop buckaroo banzai t-shirts created by independent artists from around the globe. There, his brain was taken over by Lord John Whorfin, a maniacal alien serving out his exile from Planet Ten. Emilio Lizardo, a scientist whose experimentation with parallel dimensions landed him briefly in the Eighth Dimension. ![]() Lithgow played the main antagonist in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a 1984 cult classic that bombed at the box office but attracted a small but ardent following on home video. Yeah, don’t.) There is a man who has gifted the world with the single most memorable performance in sci-fi history, and his name is John Fucking Lithgow, and we’re going to talk about it. No Chris Evans, so keep the CapAss gifs stowed. It's all in there, wrapped in a theme song that will burrow its way through your skull.This post doesn’t have any of your genre favorites. I like that the movie just drops us in this world, asking us to accept that our hero is an already well established and ultra famous scientist/spy/rockstar/ninja/fashion plate/etc, with a loyal following and a network of colorfully named and outfitted cohorts (I had the biggest crush on the chiseled blonde dude in BB's gang when I was younger, and still kinda do today).Īction, humor, and WTF moment, akimbo. I can't see a picture like this getting made in todays movie-making climate, if for no other reason than it's wholly original and takes a lot of chances. Watching it again as an adult, the fun was there, but so was the schlockiness. It was, at that point, the most bizarrely fun movie I had ever seen. I did first see this film when I was a kid. Maybe because I didn't see it until I was an adult? I might hold it in higher bonker-regards if I saw it as a kid. I kept feeling like I should just be watching Flash Gordon instead, which is way more bonkers and way more fun. I dunno, I never found this movie bonkers enough. ![]()
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