The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension - A lot of potential

I missed out on watching the - implausibly-long titled - 'The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension' when I was a kid in the eighties, but I often saw the cover (and title!) on VHS rental boxes and wondered what it would have been like.  Now, after viewing it as an adult, I wonder if I'd have liked it more if I'd had more feelings of nostalgia about it.

First of all, I can see why people now regard it as a 'cult classic' - it does have a lot going for it.  It's about a surgeon-playboy (Buckaroo Banzai, played by a pre-Robocop Peter Weller) taking on aliens hell-bet on invading the Earth and it's got a great cast, a wacky plot, some colourful characters and brilliant practical special effects.  In fact - on paper - it probably has everything I could ever want from a movie.  So why didn't it quite gel with me?

Although I can appreciate all its strong points, I just felt that the overall story was a little bit 'all over the place.' Today, if by some miracle it got made, this sort of story would require a ten part series on one of the big streaming platforms where every character and aspect of the plot can be fleshed out like I felt they should have been.

As it is, every though its runtime is just over an hour and a half, it feels like a whistlestop tour of whatever story the film-makers where originally trying to tell.  All the characters come across like they have a backstory and interesting features, just we don't have time to find out about any of them, including the titular hero who is almost at 'superhero level' of public awareness - and yet, despite the opening text crawl which I guess is supposed to fill us in on his backstory - we don't really find out anything more about him or how he reached such levels of notoriety.

I really wanted to enjoy this as much as I can see by the other reviews online that the public now seem to.  I just wanted to know more about the world and how things came to be with this band of characters.  I know they were planning on making a sequel, but that never came.  I hear a book was released many years later.  Perhaps that gives the world the deep-dive it deserves?

6/10 Should probably keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights