By EARL MAC RAUCH (Pocket; 1984/2001)
I’ll confess I was never too impressed with the 1984 movie THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE EIGHTH DIMENSION. It always seemed to me like one of the many ready-made “cult items” that littered movie theaters and video stores during the mid-to-late eighties (see TIMERIDER, ROCK ‘N’ ROLL COWBOYS, STRANGERS IN PARADISE, DR. CALIGARI, etc.). Yet after reading this novelization by the film’s screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch, which has developed quite a following over the years, I’ve decided I’ll have to change my verdict.
The mystique that’s accrued around this book is, it turns out, fully justified. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s one of the best movie novelizations I’ve ever read, complimenting and enhancing its source film considerably while standing as a uniquely spirited and invigorating piece of work that, in direct contrast to most novelizations, is far from a mere transcription of the film.
The subject is Buckaroo Banzai (played by Peter Weller in the flick), a physician/scientist/rock star who leads the Hong Kong Cavaliers, a cadre of assistants/band mates. One of them, an especially articulate individual known as Reno, narrates the book in an appropriately bemused, seriocomic tone.
Reno is quite awed by his boss, a “rare combination of cunning and civilized breeding.” That sentiment is shared by his fellow Cavaliers, who include the newly recruited cowboy wannabe Rawhide, the well-muscled Perfect Tommy and Penny Priddy, another new recruit who closely resembles Banzai’s deceased spouse (in a subplot that didn’t entirely make it into the film). Their latest adventure commences after Banzai uses the faster-than-sound Jet Car to drive into a mountain, depositing him in the eighth dimension—where, in one of the book’s most dazzling feats of description, “Sinister shadows with sweat-grimed faces and membraned eyes tried to grasp hold of the car as it shot past” amid “descents into great voids of pandemonium, illuminated by flashes of momentary radiance…followed by a darkness likened to liquid ebony, total and all-enveloping.”
Banzai survives the trip with his sanity intact, unlike Dr. Emilio Lizardo (memorably incarnated onscreen by John Lithgow), who fifty years earlier had attempted a similar inter-dimensional jaunt. Lizardo wound up with his body possessed by John Worfin, an alien entity who’s now looking to take down Banzai—and the Earth as a whole. The ensuing melee includes a car-motorcycle chase, a sojourn aboard the aliens’ space ship and a most horrific enclosure in a torture device that was only hinted at in the film, but which in literary format proves to be a truly cringe-worthy contraption.
Yes, the final page promises a sequel (as did the end credits of the movie). That sequel never occurred in literary (or filmic) format, but did eventually turn up in the form of several BUCKAROO BANZAI comic books. I haven’t read any of them, but if they’re anything like this book I’m thinking I’d better get around to doing so ASAP—as, needless to add, should you.