I was in a meeting with some business friends early this year when we started to discuss the troubling nature of how films from the past seem horrifying when viewed through the prism of today’s more woke culture. In fact, that conversation is exactly when I decided to take our podcast and turn it into this blog.

The movie we were discussing? Revenge of the Nerds.

Best friends and nerds Lewis Skolnick (Robert Carradine, son of “skinny Dracula” John Carradine and brother of David Carradine) and Gilbert Lowe (Anthony Edwards) are excited to attend Adams College, but are instantly kicked out of their dorm by the Alpha Betas, who have burned their house down. Sleeping on cots in the gym, they find other like-minded misfits and decide to create their own fraternity.

The film follows the 80’s comedy blueprint: a simple premise is stated, then hijinks ensue. Here, it is: “Nerds go to school and fight jocks, then hijinks ensue.”

Battling Alpha Betas Stan (Ted McGinley, he who has caused many a TV show to “Jump the Shark”), Burke (Matt Salinger, son of J.D. and star of 1990’s Captain America) and Ogre (Donald Gibb, Ray Jackson from Bloodsport), our Nerds overcome adversity and become a probationary Tri-Lamb fraternity. Ironically, Lambda Lambda Lambda has always been an all-black frat. And the boys only have one black member, the stereotypically gay Lamar.

That means that Tri-Lamb president U.N. Jefferson (Bernie Casey from Gargoyles!) has to come visit the boys. They throw a party that is boring until Booger’s (Curtis Armstrong) drugs get involved — welcome to the 80’s — and everyone loses their inhibitions. However, the jocks disrupt their party, leading to Jefferson coming around to the guys as he senses discrimination.

The Nerds take their titular revenge by conducting a panty raid and putting liquid heat into the jock straps of the football team, leading to Jefferson making them a real frat. However, the harassment can never stop while Stan is the President of the Greek Council. So the Nerds need to win the Greek Games during homecoming so that they get a vote — which they do so via a combination of their intelligence, more drugs and some questionable decisions (more on those in a bit). Oh yeah — and there’s also an 80’s synth music number.

The jocks trash the Nerds house, but Gilbert decides to speak up at a pep rally. The dean, U.N. Jefferson and a group of big black Tri-Lambs stand up for him and the Nerds ask all the disenfranchised in the audience to join them. The dean tells the jocks that they have to give up their house until the damage to the Tri-Lambs house is fixed, saying, “You’re jocks, go live in the gym.” Everyone celebrates. The end.

Except, well, there are some troubling moments.

What bonds the Nerds and brings them together? A panty raid, as the boys descend on the Pi Delta Pi sorority house, stealing panties, chasing women and placing video cameras, through which the boys watch the women while they go about their daily lives. In the 80’s, this was considered a prank. Today, we’d call it rape. But it gets worse. Much worse.

In the Greek Games, a pie-selling contest determines much of the final score. The Nerds win by using nude photos of Betty (Julia Montgomery, The Kindred) under the crust of their pies. Again, this is abhorrent behavior. But it gets worse.

There’s also a kissing booth, where Lewis attempts to make his move on Betty. She is replaced with a large, unattractive woman, showing that even the Nerds place an emphasis on physical versus internal beauty, no matter what hardships that very same prejudice has put them through. Then, Lewis steals Stan’s costume and tricks Betty into having sex with him. Yes, the hero of this movie knowingly ignores consent to have sex. This is pure and simple rape. This isn’t a snowflake looking back on a fun remnant of our pop culture past. This scene has bothered me since I first watching this film on VHS. Even worse, Betty falls instantly in love with her rapist, asking him if all Nerds are this good in bed.

I haven’t even gotten into the racism of the film, which posits all Japanese as horny photograph taking morons through the Takashi character. That said, Brian Tochi, the actor who played Takashi, is credited “for breaking the barriers and opening doors for East Asian people in entertainment in the U.S., and advancing the perception that Oriental actors have the ability to portray more mainstream roles.”  Those mainstream roles also include Cadet Tomoko “Elvis” Nogata in the Police Academy films, who acts just as ridiculous as Takashi (but doesn’t have his own corny Asian theme song). Or just how stereotypically gay Lamar is.

But to me, the worst sin of the film is that when the Nerds win, instead of treating their opponents with the care that they never received and teaching everyone an important lesson, they instead relegate the jocks back to the fate they had once suffered. No one learns anything. The cycle repeats and now the jocks become the Nerds who have become the jocks. This reminds me of how insular societies — wrestling fans, comic book lovers — can be more hate-filled and clique obsessed than their worst perceived enemies.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen the bottom fall out in Hollywood’s male-driven world. I wonder, how much influence did pop culture have? When someone who is put upon like the Nerds in this film, how life-affirming does it feel knowing that if you just get a hot girl to have sex with you — no matter how it happens — they’ll realize just how much worth you have and love you? For someone going through the pangs of teenage loneliness — the closing scene in Stranger Things 2 when Dustin realizes that he’s the only one who doesn’t have a partner at the dance reduced me to sobbing remembrances — this sexual reward seems like a panacea. But at what cost? It’s horrifying that this film presents this type of behavior as one worth rewarding. And frightening that generations of men have seen this film and silently acknowledged it. But hey — what can you expect from a DVD that is subtitled The Panty Raid Edition?

Note — Check back later today, as I’m happy to present a companion article “Revenge of the Nerds is a Rape Liturgy” by Ryan Ellington from Grindhouse Theology.

If you ever watch a movie with me in person, you can tell exactly how I feel about it. If I love it, I will cajole you with bon mots and trivia and exclamations like, “Did you see that shot?” If I hate it, I’ll probably just fall asleep (even if I like a movie, there’s a chance I’ll still fall asleep). And if I really, really love it, I’ll literally run around the house screaming, “I FUCKING LOVE THIS MOVIE!” and start looking up facts online and make myself a complete maniac, like some 1970s kid before they invented Ritalin.

Warriors of the Year 2072 is one of those movies. Directed by Lucio Fulci, it’s all about a future world where criminals battle one another on motorcycles for TV ratings. But really, it’s an excuse for Italian film fans to get another chapter of Mad Max and Escape from New York. From 1990: The Bronx Warriors to The New Barbarians, Exterminators of the Year 3000 and so many more, post-apocalyptic films (see our list on Letterboxd) replaced westerns, slashers and sword and sorcery films, so of course, Fulci would make one.

This one’s written by Dardano Sacchetti and Elisa Briganti, who also worked on all of Fulci’s classic films like The House by the Cemetery, The Beyond and City of the Living Dead. It was originally part of a two-picture deal, followed by Blastfighter (Lamberto Bava ended up taking over), but Fulci had issues with the producers and had to go to court. In fact, Fulci had issues with the producers from the start, as he envisioned a futuristic Rome covered by domes instead of the skyscrapers that ended up in the finished film. Really, this is a film beset by issues — it’s the last time Sacchetti would work with Fulci (look for a review of the film Conquest that really put the final nail in the coffin in the new issue of Drive-In Asylum, which will be reprinted on this site soon).

Let’s get into it. Let’s get into 2072. Let’s go to Rome, where Cortez, WBS TV’s chief of programming is pissed that he can’t compete with the rival American TV network’s show Killbike. That show has criminals fighting to the death on motorcycles — creative title, huh? The star of the show, Drake (Jared Martin from TV’s Dallas), was discovered by Cortez and has become a big star. All Cortez can answer with is a show called The Danger Game, where contestants are virtually tortured, which gives Fulci an opportunity to have a The Pit and the Pendulum style deathtrap tear a woman’s throat apart. Whew — this film was a minute or so in and one only imagines that he was chomped at the bit to insert some gore.

Turns out Drake’s wife was killed a few days ago and he murdered the three men responsible. That’s good news for Cortez, who takes the flying UFO-style WBS headquarters (which is controlled by a voice called Junior) and started to train new gladiators to fight in Rome’s Coliseum. Drake — thanks to the murder charge — is one of those warriors. They affix a detector strip to his wrist, Snake Plissken style, and draws the ire of Raven, the chief guard. Then, he meets his fellow combatants: African-American Muslim extremist Abdul (Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, so called because his San Francisco 49’ers coach asked him to stop hammering other players before he starred in numerous Italian and Blaxploitation movies) Japanese serial killer Akira (Haruiko Yamanouchi, who has starred in both a Fulci film and a Wes Anderson film, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which feels like a trivia question in the making to me), German robber Kirk (Al Cliver from Zombi!) and Latin American terrorist Tango (Tony Sanders). An old co-worker, Monk, shows up to let Drake know he has his back.

To test Drake, they put him in a hate stimulator to see if he can murder people. Even after showing him a realistic hologram of his wife being killed and her killers taunting him, he won’t crack. This whole sequence gives Fulci the chance to create his cover version of A Clockwork Orange. The whole affair wins over Cortez’s assistant, Sarah. She does some research and learns that the murder was a set-up to get Drake away from the American TV network and back to Italy.

After showing up Raven, Drake leads a prison break that fails, getting the gladiators onto the news and building more ratings buzz. They even air Raven electrocuting the prisoners to build up the drama for the upcoming TV show.

Sarah tries to put it all together and goes to meet Professor Towman, the man who invented Junior. He’s given up computers and become a mystic, speaking about the soul of his machine. That said, he gives Sarah a chip to access the machine, at which point the professor is killed. Sarah chases the killer, learning that she is her fellow WBS worker, Sybil. Just before she can confront her, Sybil is shot and killed by an unseen assassin before Sarah is saved by Monk.

FUCK ALL THAT. It’s time for the WBS Gladiator Contest, which is basically Rollerball which Fulci’s penchant for blood, open flames and chrome helmeted cycle combatants. Sarah ends up riding into the games and informs everyone that they’ll be killed by their wrist bracelets 20 minutes after the end of the battle. The gladiators riot and kill all of the guards, but not before most of their number are murdered.

Drake, Sarah, Abdul and Kirk find out that Cortez was behind everything, as he wanted to replace Sam, the head of the network. But in the kind of twist that you only get an hour and change into an Italian post-apocalyptic rip-off, it turns out that Sam is really just a computer projection, broadcast live via satellite 200,000 miles above the Earth — and he knew the plan all along.

break into the main control room and discover that Cortez is found to have plotted the death of the survivors in order to discredit Sam and take over as station head. Cortez is killed by Abdul who shoots him. Then, a computer screen image of the company boss, Sam, appears and informs them that ‘Sam’ is really just a video projection of the computer, emanating from a space satellite orbiting 200,000 miles above the Earth. The computer knew of Cortez plan but decided to let the plan happen.

Kirk tries to take off his own bracelet and dies. The true traitor is revealed: Monk, who has a camera inside his eye and now looks like a mutant. Drake shoots him with a laser, but the team is running out of time. In two minutes, they’ll be disintegrated and Sam can use his signal to take over people’s minds. Somehow, Sarah uses a part of Monk’s eye to reprogram Sam in a MacGyver-like deus ex machina ending. Now that the battle is over, Drake and Sarah steal a hover vehicle and escape.

Made five years before The Running Man (but two years after the novel was written), Fulci takes his own spin on what comes after the end of the world. There are plenty of cool touches, like the strobe light training sequence where Williamson shows his martial arts prowess. It’s not The Beyond, but it’s not like you’ll be bored. I’d be interested to see what else Fulci could have done within the SF genre. This is filled with just enough weirdness that it kept my attention. It did more than that — it made me run around my house with pure glee, yelling, “NEW GLADIATORS! YAY!”

Also a quick shoutout — the site House of Freudstein is AMAZING. So much to read and such a great interview with Fred Williamson! There’s plenty to devour here!

PS – Troma got the rights to this and released it on DVD, which means that there’s a Lloyd Kaufman intro to the film. The fact that this hackneyed piece of shit (tell us how you really feel) gets to even be associated with Lucio Fulci makes my blood boil. It’s the same level of anger I get when I think about how Chasing Amy is in the fucking Criterion Collection! WHY? WHY? WHY?

You can get this from Severin who were awesome enough to quote us on the back cover!

I could have been the best, I could have had it made. Because of you and all the rest I wound up in a grave. In my dying day, revenge I swore I’d take. Now your time is running out! Let’s kill for killing’s sake!

1984’s Rocktober Blood starts with Billy “Eye” Harper singing “I’m Back” while his girlfriend and backup singer Lynn Starling watches. Billy tells her off, telling her he’s going out on a date with someone else. Before he leaves, he tells her he wrote the song “Rainbow Eyes” for her. Everyone in the band leaves except Lynn, who tries to record some of her own tracks before turning down the recording engineer’s come on and going to the jacuzzi upstairs alone.

Billy returns, only to kill the engineer while he’s playing pinball by slicing his throat. Then, he impales the engineer’s assistant (he must have hated the mix) before smoking some drugs in  a metal one hitter while looking like Larry Sweeney. Lynn has no clue any of this has transpired, but she soon  finds out that he’s killed both of them. Billy wants to make sure his message is coming through as he begins laughing like a villain. Lynn discovers the assistant’s body as Billy continues to laugh and menaces her with a knife, demanding that she sing. A passing security guard saves her life and we cut to two years later and the Rocktober Blood Release party.

Billy was captured, tried and executed while Lynn and the remaining band members changed their name to Headmistress. VJ Rick Righteous stops by, does some coke and interviews Lynn about Billy’s murder spree and having to finger Billy, which led to his conviction.

Then, while the bands are playing and everyone is dancing and getting their faces painted and smoking cigarettes and breakdancing, a mysterious figure appears and tells Lynn she needs to meet with her manager. It’s all a ruse, because it’s Billy — back from the grave, just like he said he would be.  Lynn is left crying in the corner, emotionally decimated by whatever Billy said to her.

I really have to note that there is way too much breakdancing for a heavy metal movie. In my experience, these worlds never played well together.

Lynn goes away to a cabin, but Billy’s music follows her everywhere she runs, so she tries to aerobic exorcise Billy away. There are more girls sweating in this scene than a Bruce Seven video. The phone keeps ringing, leading to an insane prank phone call (sampled on Acid Witch’s “Midnight Movies” EP) that has the caller begging for “hot steaming pussy blood all over my face.” The phone just keeps ringing and ringing, even when its off the hook, but look out! Billy’s in the house!

He starts killing anyone that is close to Lynn, including drowning one girl with a high collar in the jacuzzi. He keeps hiding the bodies so that everyone thinks she’s gone crazy again.

Also – the sets for this are the most 80s sets you’ve ever seen. Everything is wood grain and giant bathtubs and giant houseplants. It’s nearly 70s more than 80s. But who the fuck carpets a bathroom?

Also, the film makes every opportunity to show nudity, if you’re interested in those things. Fun fact: in the VHS pre-internet era, this was as good as it got for most kids under 18.

Security gets increased and the head security guy acts like a complete prick to Lynn, making fun of her for being so afraid. Well, you know, if your boyfriend killed a ton of people and then stabbed you, well, maybe you’d be a little worried.

After all this craziness, Lynn decides that she’s going to dig up Billy’s grave…and Billy is in it. So who is it that’s screwing with her? We don’t have long to wait. Billy shows up backstage and a groupie asks, “Who are you?” “Death,” he responds as he kills her with a hot iron. Yes, he literally irons her neck. This just took this review from a frown to a smile.

Lynn and the band are getting ready to perform when Billy reappears to tell her that he’s really Billy’s twin brother John…and she let the wrong man die. He wrote all the songs by himself and tonight, he’ll perform them and kill her at the end of the show. Holy shit, I love John. I love how he randomly says stuff like, “Fucker!” He makes this movie so much better than it is before he finally reveals himself.

The band takes to the stage and security guards save the day. Again. Ugh. At least John gets to scream “I’m Back” as they take him away.

Rocktober Blood isn’t an easy watch. The music is way better than the film, thanks to Sorcery. A band that played metal while two master magicians playing Merlin and the devil battled on stage, they’ve been on my radar since I first saw the trailer to Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Stunt Rock. I don’t have the right words to explain to you my love for this trailer, so I’ll just share it.

Do you have a metal horror movie I missed? Yeah, I know Deathgasm is probably a good one, but I’m more about the cruddy VHS films, what can I say? But let me know — I’m sure there will be another week of metal movie marijuana massacre meltdown soon.

Be sure to check out out review of Rocktober Blood 2: Billy’s Revenge, part of our “Box Office Failures Week” and our second look at Rocktober Blood by R.D Francis to commemorate the July 31, 2019 death Nigel Benjamin, the “voice” of Billy Eye Harper.

Let’s face it. I love portmanteau movies. From Tales from the Crypt to Asylum, The House that Dripped Blood and The Monster Club, a good part of our DVD collection is devoted to these films (mostly of the Amicus variety). 1984’s The Dungeonmaster attempts to be both a narrative and portmanteau all at the same time — to sometimes uneven results.

Also known as Ragewar: The Challenges of Excalibrate and Digital Knights, this Charles Band-produced effort (Puppet Master, Subspecies, Re-Animator) made up of seven different segments, all connected by the battle between Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron, Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn ) and Mestema (Richard Moll, who played Bull from TV’s Night Court, as well as The Sword and the Sorcerer, House, Wicked Stepmother and more). Again, it’s a film that struggles to find a tone — it wants to be Tron as much as it wants to be a filmed version of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

Paul may not be able to balance a checkbook, but he loves to jog and he’s great at fixing computers. In fact, the dude is so good, he has 2017 iPhone tech that tracks his jogging. If you watch the film today, you’ll be like, “Yeah, so what.” But keep in mind, this is a 33-year-old movie.

At some point, Paul did a neural net experiment that allows him to talk to X-CaliBR, his female personal computer. This is the only futuristic tech in this world, so I guess we all have to accept that people’s brains can be wired to their CPUs.

Paul keeps having dreams where he is making love to a beautiful woman. The more knowledgeable of you out there will realize that this scene doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the movie. It was probably to secure foreign distribution with the amount of flesh on display.

Paul lives with his girlfriend Gwen live together, but she’s super jealous of how close he is to his computer. None of that has anything else to do with what happens next — the sorcerer Mestema — who has spent thousands of years looking for a worthy opponent — kidnaps both of them.

What follows are the portmanteau segments, where Paul and his laser wristband must travel through different dimensions and time to battle Mestema and win back Gwen.

PART 1: ICE GALLERY

Ever seen Waxwork? So did everyone working on this. That said — the visuals are pretty nice here, with various monsters and killers throughout history all frozen inside a giant cave. Why is Albert Einstein there? Is it a comment on his role in the nuclear bomb? No one ever really explains that — this is a movie that you either damn for being stupid or fill in the narrative gaps yourself.

PART 2: DEMONS OF THE DEAD

I originally learned of this film from the Alamo Drafthouse’s Trailer War compilation. This scene is prominently featured in the trailer, with Fulci like zombies being dispatched with laser beams. It is, as I am often heard to yell, “Fucking awesome.” It’s written and directed by John Carl Buechler, who was Jack Cracker in the first two Hatchet movies.

PART 3: HEAVY METAL

In this segment, directed by Charles Band, our heroes battle 80s metal kings W.A.S.P. If you love Blackie Lawless, well, this is the movie for you, as he is front and center and menacing Gwen. Sadly, Chris Holmes does not appear with his mother in this scene.

PART 4: STONE CANYON GIANT

Stop motion style fun here, with a giant canyon monster blocking Paul from progress. This segment was written and directed by Dave Allen, who got his start with Equinox and worked on a huge variety of films from Flesh Gordon, Laserblast and The Howling to *batteries not included, Willow, the Puppet Master series, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and so much more. Sadly, he died from cancer in 1999.

In a strange moment of Wiki research, I learned that Allen used to be married to a woman named Donita Woodruff. She learned that Allen had an ex-girlfriend named Valerie Taylor, which led to a fight between the two women. Woodruff suspected that Taylor had a criminal past and found enough evidence to get the police to arrest her in 1996 for a 1979 South Carolina murder. Taylor pleaded self-defense and served two years, while Allen and Woodruff would divorce two years later. There’s even a book about it — Deadly Masquerade: A True Story of Illicit Passion, Buried Secrets, and Murder.

Check this out — “Donita, a young, single mother of two lives in the day-to-day confinement of a small town in rural Oklahoma. Hungering for a second chance and the bustle of the big city, she decides to move her family back home to Los Angeles. Still hurting from previous romantic relationships, Donita is hesitant to start anything new; anything until she meets Academy Award nominee David Allen—successful, handsome and charming. The two are quickly swept up in a whirlwind romance. Life seems too good to be true but even wedding bells can’t hide the secrets her new husband has. Suddenly, Donita and her children are caught in a Deadly Masquerade, a world of vicious lies and double lives, where nothing is as it appears.

Mysterious phone calls, a questionable ex-lover, an unsolved murder, all begin to unravel in Donita Woodruff’s true-life account, Deadly Masquerade. When the perfect man reveals a sordid, double life, she is forced into a series of stunning revelations. Now, she only has one choice—to take matters into her own hands.”

Seriously — they should have just film this book NOW. Because I just learned that Valerie Taylor used to be a man. And that’s why Woodruff was so freaked out! AGAIN –Wikipedia will lead you down some crazy wormholes.

PART 5 – SLASHER

All of a sudden, the film becomes a cross between Quantum Leap and a horror movie. It’s written by lead actor Jeffrey Byron and directed by Steven Ford (the son of former U.S. President Gerald Ford — fuck, this movie has a veritable rogue’s gallery of backstories). Paul has to escape from the police to rescue Glen from a serial killer.

PART 6 – CAVE BEAST

A cave beast blocks the way and Paul must fight his way past it. Look — not all of The Dungeonmaster has to be complicated.

PART 7 – DESERT PURSUIT

Mad Max style racing across the desert that seems to end with our characters dying in a head-on collision in a sequence written and directed by Ted Nicolaou (Bad Channels, TerrorVision). In case you’re wondering, yes, these are the same vehicles from Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn.

Finally, Paul challenges Mestema to a one on one battle, which ends when Paul throws the sorcerer into a pit of lava. At this point, Gwen decides that X-CaliBR8 isn’t so bad and that she can finally marry Paul.

Like any portmanteau, there are some good and bad parts in equal measure. Richard Moll is awesome in this, just chewing scenery and blasting out some insane dialogue. The zombie scene is good, as is the giant. But your life won’t change watching this film. If you’re looking for something to put on as a soundtrack to a party or some great visuals, it’s certainly good for that.

Shout Factory put this out on blu ray in a double set with The Eliminators, which makes me happy that such a strange, goofy set of films can get such a prestige treatment.

PS – A sequel segment was filmed for the anthology Pulse Pounders and only shown once, but since Empire Pictures closed, no one is sure as to when it will be released. Moll and Byron came back for this sequel — which I’d love to see.

Pulse Ponders was to be another portmanteau with three stories: The Evil Clergyman, Trancers: City of Lost Angels and The Dungeonmaster II: A Sorcerer’s Nightmare. Some of it has come out, so here’s to the full release!

There are movies. And then there are movies that change your entire life. Buckaroo Banzai is the film that changed mine. Why did I just have to be one thing when Buckaroo could be a neurosurgeon, particle physicist, race car driver, rock star and probably the last hope of the human race? “Is, ahh… is somebody… is somebody crying?… out there in the darkness? Somebody crying?”

This is also a film that confounds me — how the fuck did this ever get past the bean counters of Hollywood? It’s an insane proposition — we’re thrust in the middle of Buckaroo’s adventures with the hope that we’ll think it’s awesome that so much has gone on before. For me, it is, but I can only imagine how confused 1984 audiences were watching this.

Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller, RoboCop) and Dr. Hikita have finally created the oscillation overthruster, which allows Buckaroo to drive his jet car through a mountain, then another dimension. A brain is left behind on the bottom the car, though.

News of the jet car reaches Dr. Emilio Lizard (a never better John Lithgow), who invented the overthruster with Hikata way back in 1938…the same year that aliens landed in New Jersey. For real. Are you still with the film? Well, hold on. It’s about to go even crazier.

Buckaroo’s Hong Kong Cavaliers are like the Shadow and Doc Savage’s Fabulous Five, except they’re also great musicians. At a tour date, Buckaroo notices a suicidal woman in the crowd named Penny Priddy (a never hotter Ellen Barkin who imprinted my brain on what girls should look like at a very young age). As he sings to her, she tries to kill herself, which is mistaken for an attempt to Banzai’s life. Yep — every single one of the Cavaliers are packing heat. But Buckaroo insists on bailing her out of jail, even before he discovers that she’s the long-lost sister of his dead wife. Still with the movie?

Man — let me try and sum up what happens next. At a press conference, strange men kidnap Hikata and due to an electrical shock, only Buckaroo sees them for the lizard aliens that they really are. The good aliens, who all look like rastas and have the first name John, show up and explain that they, the Black Lectroids, have been at war with the Red Lectroids for thousands of years. They plan on nuking Earth unless Buckaroo can make sure that the Red Lectroids never get their hands on his invention.

Will Buckaroo save the Earth? Will Penny fall in love with him? Will New Jersey fit in with the rest of the Irregulars and why did he have a whole cowboy outfit with him? Why do they call him Perfect Tommy? Who is Hanoi Xan? Why didn’t Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League ever get made?

This film will leave you with more questions than answers. And that’s good. That’s the way life is and how it should be.

Also — nearly every one of my favorite character actors is in this film — Christoper Lloyd, Dan Hedaya and Vincent Schiavelli all play aliens. Even Yakov Smirnoff shows up as a national security officer.

Fox publicity said of the film, Nobody knew what to do with Buckaroo Banzai. There was no simple way to tell anyone what it was about—I’m not sure anybody knew.” They didn’t even try to advertise the movie, which found its audience, as its specifically a movie made by weirdos who don’t feel the need to explain the joke for weirdos who will explain the joke for themselves. What other movie has references to 19th Century evangelist Dwight L. Moody, Gravity’s Rainbow and song Rocket 88?

Buckaroo taught me the early Zen with which I would try to comprehend this crazy life. And that no matter how much the world wants you to be normal and says you have to excel at just one thing, you can be anything. And then something else, too. Buckaroo said it all in one simple phrase: “Remember, wherever you go, there you are.”

PS – Screenwriter WD Richter would also add many more quotes to the universe via Jack Burton with his work on Big Trouble in Little China two years later.

PSS – Ever wonder what my favorite end credits are?