For the week of August 15th, Shout Factory is bringing the cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension to Blu-ray. Full disclosure: I've never been as big a fan of this musical-sci-fi-horror-action-comedy as I feel I should be, and I'm willing to point the finger at director W.D. Richter. As a screenwriter, Richter is responsible for penning two of the greatest genre films ever made (the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake and John Carpenter's brilliant Big Trouble in Little China), but his direction on Buckaroo Banzai leaves a lot to be desired. He needs to keep things way snappier than they are - long stretches of this movie amble when they should race - and his direction of the action sequences is often flat and visually undistinguished. I get that Richter had to shoulder a lot of studio interference and budgetary woes (including the forced exodus of original DP Jordan Cronenweth), but so much of the film's last act finds characters running through the same bland corridors, and I can think of many other directors who could have kept these beats fresh (*coughJohnCarpentercough*). It's a shame, too, because so much of the raw materials are aces. On the page, Earl Mac Rauch's script is a wonder: funny and strange and playfully incoherent. It reads like the successful version of Southland Tales or something, and it maintains a fair portion of its screwball rhythms even when Richter is slowing them down. Better still is the cast, an eclectic, hyper-talented ensemble of cult favorites, future stars, and character greats that includes (*deep breath*) Peter Weller, Ellen Barkin, John Lithgow, Jeff Goldblum, Clancy Brown, Christopher Lloyd, Carl Lumbly, Vincent Schiavelli, Dan Hedaya, and Yakov Freakin' Smirnoff! It's a measure of Rauch's writing that everyone gets a moment to shine (even the less famous day players like Pepe Serna, Lewis Smith, and Billy Vera), but top marks definitely go to Weller (as the unflappable, freakishly charismatic title character) and Lithgow, whose Red Lectroid psycho still ranks as the most alien thing he's ever played. The end experience is like watching a Rolls Royce made with Toyota Camry parts. Good, but you can see so much more!
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that the film "really has very few antecedents or successors, either in terms of content or even style. This is a living cartoon that is part Chuck Jones, part Erwin Schrödinger, and the result is one of the more bizarre 'casseroles' imaginable…I'm not going to pretend that the rest of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension makes a lot of sense, because it frankly doesn't. There's a typical alien invasion scenario, but the film is stuffed to the gills with interstitial bits and character arcs that just kind of waft through the main storyline like (alien?) pollen. Some of these involve the so-called Hong Kong Cavaliers, Buckaroo's acolytes but also his bandmates (yes, folks, Buckaroo is a fantastic musician, as well). There's also a silly sidebar involving a woman named Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin) whom Buckaroo singles out at a concert he's giving when she's the only one not having a good time (something the ultra empathetic Buckaroo realizes from the stage). The film is just a wild collage of material, and those wanting a tightly constructed screenplay that offers thoughtful riffs on science are probably not going to be overly convinced by Buckaroo Banzai's kind of shaggy dog story approach toward everything. However, those who are willing to cut the film's haphazard tendencies a little slack and simply go with the flow are in for a largely entertaining ride. Weller's almost inherent gravitas plays extremely well against the lunatic proclivities of a truly unhinged Lithgow, and the film's production design is often extremely inventive. While probably too convoluted for its own good, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is at its core silly fun with probably unsupportable ambitions toward science fiction 'meaning.'"
Also from Shout - its Scream Factory division, to be more precise - is the ghost story Session 9. Director Brad Anderson's most memorable chiller takes place in a derelict Massachusetts mental hospital as a team of asbestos removers (Peter Mullen, David Caruso, Brendan Sexton III, and Stephen Gevedon, who co-wrote the screenplay with Anderson) labor to scrub the building of deadly toxins. The job alone would be bad enough - Mullen's character is so financially strapped that he's agreed to an impossible week-long completion agreement, and the pace tests the limits of the four-man crew - but things worsen when the workers begin to find evidence of something else in the abandoned building. As these kinds of pictures go, Session 9 is drawing on a rich tradition that reaches back to James Whale and Robert Wise, and like those, the real star of the film is the Danvers State Mental Hospital, starring as itself. At the time, Danvers was just as crumbling and viscerally terrifying as it appears on-screen (it has since been partially demolished and slated for renovations), and it's the greatest gift anyone could give to a horror movie; all Anderson and his DP Uta Briesewitz really need to do is point their camera in any direction, and they'll capture something unsettling. It's a measure of how chilling the location is that we could watch a whole movie of his actors stumbling through Danvers, and it's illustrative of Session 9's most controversial element, which finds the terror shifting gears from...but I've said too much. Suffice to say, the answers that Anderson and Gevedon provide aren't necessarily the ones you're expecting, and for some viewers, they'll play as a little too tricksy. For others (this reviewer included), they offer another layer to process, and one that gooses Session 9 with its most disturbing revelation. Anderson has tried to recapture this one's magic a few times since - the dark character study The Machinist, the psychological thriller Stonehearst Asylum, and the no-budget monster movie Vanishing on 7th Street - but he's never manages quite as devastating a balance as with Session 9. One of the great horror movies of the Aughts.
And because Shout continues to crush it on home media, we have John Carpenter's Elvis biopic. Anyone expecting a warts-and-all story of the King should look elsewhere. Despite the three-hour runtime, Carpenter is clearly interested in hagiography, in giving Presley (played by Kurt Russell, in the first of his five collaborations with Carpenter) the Icon Treatment, and as such we follow a pretty conventional narrative path: begin with humble origins, rise to stardom, struggles with fame, ending with redemption. It's a template that's so well worn - and was even in 1979 - you get why the only logical next step was parody, a la Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, and fans of that music spoof may find a lot of Elvis unintentionally hilarious. However, just because Elvis is safe doesn't mean it's bad - far from it. Already a genre mainstay thanks to his work on Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween, Carpenter was operating at the peak of his powers, and he helps give Elvis a polish and sheen that it might not otherwise have. Sometimes, it's hard to believe that this was a made-for-TV movie, so fluid and confident is Carpenter's direction. But Russell is easily his equal, and his work as Elvis remains one of his best performances. Even though we're getting the Classics Illustrated version, Russell doesn't pander or soften his own approach to character. We get both sides of the great man - the consummate entertainer and the paranoid ruin - even though Anthony Lawrence's teleplay strongly favors the former. That's all Russell. Few actors are so adept at giving full weight to a person's greatest strengths and deepest insecurities, and fewer still can do so only on a subtextual level. But then again, maybe all of Elvis is subtext. By 1979, most Elvis fans knew the sordid details of the King's fall and subsequent death, and that knowledge permeates the text. Carpenter and Russell, as such, don't need those details, thus restoring a measure of grace to Elvis while always alluding to the problems to come. A fine, accomplished piece of work.
Finally, Universal Studios Home Entertainment is offering wide releases to two Best-Buy exclusives, the Tom Hanks comedies The Money Pit and The 'Burbs. Anyone only familiar with Hanks from his Academy Award-winning turns in Forrest Gump or Philadelphia might react both films with a shock: the Hanks on display here is blissfully unaffected by prestige motivation or serious ambition. He's a goof, especially in The Money Pit. Years of basic-cable play have been kind to this film's reputation, extending the shelf life of an otherwise sloppy, formulaic farce about two lovers (Shelley Long and Hanks) who buy a decrepit old manse and pretty much lose their minds trying to repair it. I'd say it's on par with an old sitcom, but then again, Long starred on an old sitcom which just happened to be one of the high-water marks of the medium, and The Money Pit is nowhere near as good. Yet Hanks singlehandedly justifies the proceedings. Other than 1984's underrated sex-comedy Bachelor Party, Hanks has never been zanier, and he sells conventional slapstick beats (the Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare he faces when he sleepily walks into construction; the epic collapse of the house's main stairwell) through the sheer force of his comic invention. At times, we could be watching the Brundlefly meld of Charlie Chaplin and Bill Murray - Hanks's physical timing is Swiss Watch-precise, but then he can punctuate the action with a perfectly timed sarcastic zinger (he gets the best line of the film after the rogue turkey setpiece: "I don't think that can hurt us anymore"). I suspect fans of his light-comedy work in You've Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle might think him too broad, but I wish he'd cut loose like this more often. He's certainly more restrained in The 'Burbs, but that's okay, considering The 'Burbs might be the best thing director Joe Dante ever made (it's a really close race between it, Gremlins 2, and his great Innerspace). The 'Burbs is deceptively slight - suburbanite Ray Petersen (Hanks) is settling into a stay-at-home vacation - but that limited scope gives Dante the excuse to indulge some of his most ebullient pure-cinema tendencies. Since we're relegated to the studio backlot that is Ray's cul-de-sac, Dante can exercise full creative control, swooping his camera in and out of shots and staging large scale homages to his favorite movies and otherwise treating the proceedings with the kind of cartoon elasticity that Frank Tashlin brought to his live-action comedies. At the top of Dante's roster of absurdities? Oh, just the notion that Ray's new neighbors (led by Henry Gibson and Letterman's own Brother Theodore, of all people) might just be Devil-worshipping cannibals, a premise that, in Dante's hands, plays like the love-child of Dario Argento and Daffy Duck. Just beneath that, though, is the bumbling investigation of Ray and his "normal" neighbors (Bruce Dern, Corey Feldman, and the late Rick Ducommun, pretty much stealing the whole damn movie from everyone else) who increasingly seem anything but. The 'Burbs flopped upon its release (it is an odd bird, this one, a hangout movie that grows ever more paranoid), but now it looks like one of the 1980s best features. Taken together, these two pictures entertain, and a little more: they make you miss the wide-eyed, sweet abandon of a funny guy right before he became the biggest star in the world.
Martin Liebman noted in his Money Pit review that "in the film's final act, when that madness reaches its boiling point and the scales could tip in either direction for the couple's future…it loses much, if not most, of its charm. It drags, hard, after a much lighter, albeit with dark undercurrents, open. The movie shifts from a rather pleasing and funny comedy, again with more than a bit of underlying human interest emotion and drama, to a fairly drab back-and-forth between Walter and Anna that's a result of the stresses they've endured throughout the ordeal in the house. In the film's defense, the parallel to the crumbling house - those dreams falling to pieces - is very clear and thematically fits in the story. Whether it fits in the movie, to this hard-edged degree, is another story. The turn from painfully charming to downright ugly, even as the film tries its hardest to maintain a light edge, puts more of a dour note on the film than is needed...It's funny, but uncomfortably so, as one couple's home deteriorates in every way imaginable. It gets too serious as their love begins to fray and fall apart. It's tonally uneven in a drastic way, even as it all fits, leaving the movie more frustrating than fulfilling." And of The 'Burbs, Liebman wrote that the "film can be summarized as "conspiracy theories run wild in the suburbs." Everyday life - and maybe more damaging to the nutso cul-de-sac, routine - is upset with the arrival of mysterious new neighbors. That upset leads to gossip. Which becomes hushed whispers laced with doubt and fear. Which becomes conspiracy-laden paranoia. Which becomes an unhealthy obsession. Which becomes spying. Snooping. Breaking and entering. And who knows what else might happen when the neighborhood's eccentrics gather to find the, or their, truth. The film works as well as it does, in its driving story arc, because the script is well constructed, putting together just the right volatile mixture of characters who, individually, might only raise an eyebrow and mumble under his breath about an unkempt yard or new less-than-ideal neighbors. Maybe the most fiery of the bunch may throw a few direct jabs when pushed hard enough. But together...together...the temperature rises considerably and whispers become screams, screams laced with everything from curiosity to fear and the formation of some trance-like passion of paranoia. Some of the film's humor tends to get lost in the underlying, but never unmistakable, darkness that courses through it. The movie is almost a freak show by the end. The questions, then, are who are the truly bad neighbors and was there any merit to their ever-increasing suspicions?"