Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris)

by Steven Erikson

  Got all that? There is also a bit of business with a suicidally depressed young woman who just happens to be the long-lost twin of Banzai’s late wife (murdered by one of Banzai’s other nemeses), who gets kidnapped by Whorfin’s henchmen along the way, and whom Banzai has to save before things are said and done.

  The disjointed, almost improvisational quality to the movie’s plot and structure can be traced to the project’s genesis in dinner conversations between director W.D. Richter, who had already gained a reputation as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and writer Earl Mac Rauch, who had penned a couple of novels before moving west at Richter’s invitation to try his hand at screenplays. In developing Buckaroo Banzai, Mac Rauch reportedly began and abandoned multiple drafts of a script, gradually elaborating on the character and his world, adding an almost baroque level of detail to Banzai’s associates and their long history of adventuring. In the finished film, there are unexplained references to previous adventures that are never elaborated upon, plot threads for future adventures that will never be revisited. And during production, Mac Rauch was busy writing the ‘novelization’ of the film, having done a ‘low-ball deal’ to ensure that no one else would be tapped to write the novel but him, and filled the book with even more references to the character’s imaginary continuity, footnotes, and more. (Even if attempted sequels and TV spin-offs have failed, there are scads of ‘authorized’ fanzines, comic books, and more for anyone interested in the further adventures of Banzai, many of them written by Mac Rauch himself.)

  Perhaps the strangest thing about the film for many viewers is that it isn’t a comedy. Or at least, it doesn’t seem to think it’s a comedy. Banzai and his companions are played completely straight, with all the deadpan sincerity of the square-jawed heroes of Saturday-morning adventure serials. Sure, absurdities abound, but even the jokes are presented in such a way that we’re apparently meant to take them seriously. It may be absurdist, but it is an absurdist adventure, not a comedy.

  It’s surprising, in many ways, that Buckaroo Banzai ever got made at all. It’s the kind of story that one might spin out… well, while enjoying a bit of postprandial intoxication, let’s say. The kind of story where the listeners suggest ever more ludicrous additions, like an audience tossing out ridiculous topics and settings in an attempt to stump an improvisational troupe. It’s a story where the ridiculous and absurd are treated as matter-of-fact, because if they weren’t then the whole thing would collapse under its own weight.

  Structurally, the film is something of a mess, and the fact that it is presented as merely the most recent in an ongoing series of adventurers means that much that happens isn’t given any kind of real narrative weight. It’s almost as if we’re expected to just tune in ‘next time’ to find out what it all actually means. But for some viewers, myself included, that’s just part of its charm. It may not measure up when laid against the yardstick of the conventional movie narrative. It may, as I said, not even be very good. But if you buy into the movie’s own strange internal logic, if you stop worrying about ‘plot’ and ‘meaning’ and ‘quality,’ there’s a kind of genius at its core. And judged on those standards, Buckaroo Banzai is great.

  What it is not, however, is a blockbuster. It isn’t even commercially viable, realistically. So why did it get made?

  I think it was a matter of confusion and miscommunication.

  Executive David Begelman, the head of the independent production company Sherwood Productions, greenlit the film thinking that he had found his very own Raiders of the Lost Ark type franchise. He saw series potential, even going so far as to insist that the film end with a ‘Coming Soon’ teaser for the sequel. But clearly, Begelman didn’t have the first clue what kind of movie Richter and Mac Rauch wanted to make. Even as they were making this strange, one-of-a-kind absurdist adventure, he was certain he had a box-office smash on his hands.

  Begelman famously interfered with the production in arbitrary ways, such as objecting that the red-framed glasses worn by the hero in some scenes made him look ‘gay.’ Eventually, Richter began to insert nonsensical elements, just to see if Begelman was paying any attention to the dailies (the ‘watermelon scene,’ long a subject of debate for fans of the film, was just such a test, which according to the director Begelman never noticed).

  When the film was released to tepid reviews and less-than-stellar box office returns, Begelman apparently felt that Richter and Mac Rauch had personally betrayed him, as though they had been tricking him all along. For the rest of his remaining years, until he tragically took his own life in 1995, Begelman stood in the way of Richter and Mac Rauch doing anything further with the characters, even going so far as to refuse to grant ABC the rights to develop the property as a television series.

  Hardcore devotees of the film (and they are out there… and yes, I’m probably one of them) forever bemoan the fact that the sequel, Buckaroo Banzai and the World Crime League, was never made, or that the Buckaroo Banzai: Ancient Secrets & New Mysteries TV series died aborning. But really, they should be grateful that Across the 8th Dimension was made at all. It may be a flawed movie, and one that no seasoned executive would have ever greenlit, but its flaws make it great. And we’ll probably never see another movie like it again.

  So remember: No matter where you go, there you are…

  REPO MAN

  (Director: Alex Cox; starring: Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, Tracey Walter, Olivia Barash - 1984)

  John Skipp

  Oh, Repo Man. I love you so.

  If movies were former paramours I could travel back in time with, onboard an unidentified flying Chevy Malibu that was also – yeah, you got it, a TIME MACHINE! – I would never stop laughing and rolling around with that beautiful, hilarious, deliriously visionary film.

  Repo Man is one of those movies so jam-packed with fun, outrageous ideas and preposterous tangents that it not only defies, but laughs in the face of any attempt to describe it: a marketing nightmare for the poor dumb bastards at Universal, who almost killed this movie rather than admit their own helplessness in the face of its awesome power.

  In the simplest terms, it’s the story of Otto, a dumbass white suburban punk who stumbles sideways into infinity. As played to perfection by Emilio Estevez, he’s a blank, cackling, quintessential fool, for whom the lowlife undertow of seedy Los Angeles is a launching pad for all the mysteries of existence.

  Wandering back from a stupid cock-blocked punk rock party one early morning, Otto runs into Bud (the astonishing Harry Dean Stanton). Next thing he knows, he’s a repo man with the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation: a professional car thief, ripping the wheels out from under hapless ‘dildos who don’t pay their bills.’

  But along the way, Otto finds himself increasingly entangled in the ‘lattice of coincidence’ that underlies all things, as he is just-as-haplessly pinballed between decomposing aliens, shadowy government conspiracies, lobotomized mad scientists, rival repo gangs, bumbling liquour store heist aficionados with skinheads and bad Jimmy Cagney impressions, breathtakingly insincere evangelists, useless hippie parents, mystic acid casualties, plates of shrimp, The United Fruitcake Outlet, and the now sadly defunct Weekly World News.

  Which ain’t but the half of it.

  It would be soooo easy for me to wax on forever about why Repo Man is one of my all-time most dearly beloved films. Or to explain why I think it’s the very best movie about the secret, and therefore real Los Angeles, as I experience it day to day. Or to point out why I think it’s also the most punk rock movie ever made (acing even writer/director Alex Cox’s legendary follow-up, Sid and Nancy).

  But why does it rank amongst the greatest science fiction films of all time?

  Possibly because there’s more pure unhinged fucking Philip K. Dick in Repo Man than there is in any film that actually bears his name (with the possible exception of Linklater’s A Scanner, Darkly). Shriek all you want: more than the brilliant Blade Runner. And certainly more than all the dimbulb action shitb
alls that Dick would have died before watching, had he lived long enough.

  With a schizophrenic’s helpless freeballing hyperconnectedness, and a master film-maker’s consummate control of the medium, Cox crams more salient and revelatory minutiae into every frame than most space opera stalwarts contain in their entire oeuvres. Which means that the movie is bristling with intelligence, even when the characters inside it are most decidedly not.

  Never in the history of science fiction film has such systematic dismantling of reality-as-we-know-it been conducted with more casually anarchic glee. Like the same summer’s Buckaroo Banzai, it’s playful psychic subversion at its finest.

  But unlike Buckaroo, there are no super-genius heroes on hand to save us. We’re all bozos on this bus, as the comparably gonzo 70s comedy troupe The Firesign Theater once stated; and now that I mention it, that’s as good a vintage pop culture comparison as I can make, in terms of tonality and countercultural intent. With a definite nod toward Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus trilogy, so long as we’re at it. And Rev. Ivan Stang’s Book of the SubGenius, which underground cartoonist Jay Kinney quite accurately referred to as ‘staggering brilliance, masquerading as total bullshit.’

  But Cox’s trump card – at least for me – is the way he grounds the whole wild mashup in street-level, bottom-feeding veracity. The people with whom we spend most of our time are as far away from godhead enlightenment or actual attainable human wisdom as a human being could get. Just like most of us. Scrabbling for clues in the chaos.

  Alex Cox was a Brit expat – actually working as a repo man himself – when he first conceived of this glorious film. And he brings an outsider’s wonder and awe to what was clearly an alien universe.

  Like the best verbal historians – like Studs Terkel on weed and speed – he gets the dialogue so right that I have spent the rest of my life quoting it. It reeks deliciously of the actually-overheard: the random shit so crazy it has to be real. If not actually – from a content standpoint – true.

  Were I composing a lazier piece, I’d just quote the motherfucker verbatim for 1,000 words and leave it at that. And you know what? It would be waaaay more entertaining than what you’re reading right now.

  But dialogue is nothing but scribbles on pieces of paper that nobody ever reads without great actors to deliver it. And like Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder, Quentin Tarantino, and the Coen Bros., Cox takes extra-special care to populate his screenplay in such a way that even the teeniest parts are stunningly vibrant with life.

  Then he proceeds to stuff his motion picture with character actors so impeccably selected that you’d swear they were all born in that film. That they couldn’t possibly be anyone else but the people they are in that crazily perfect hellish heaven on Earth.

  How do you pick a performance, when every performance is so great? Fox Harris, Dick Rude, Vonetta McGee, Zander Schloss and Sy Richardson are just the tip of the tip of an iceberg so huge it could easily gobble this book.

  But pick I must, and so I follow my heart and the herd directly to Tracey Walter as Miller, the radiant sad-sack acid burnout and not-so-secret heart of Repo Man. Whether explaining the universe over a burning trash barrel, or explaining how he knows that ‘John Wayne was a fag,’ he’s such a glistening gem – discarded by society at large, but treasured by the rest of us forever – that all must shield their eyes as they stare in wonder at his weirdly-but-truly glorious light. I know I do!

  And so we come to the ending, about which I will say this: it’s the only riff on Bowman’s trip in 2001: A Space Odyssey that simultaneously pokes and deeply embraces the wonder unveiled in Kubrick’s own timeless masterpiece.

  Repo Man? I would marry you. And in fact, already have, every time I watch you. Dozens of times, over the many years, with dozens and dozens more to come.

  ‘Ordinary fucking people,’ Bud says. ‘I hate ‘em.’ But the Alex Cox of Repo Man clearly does not.

  Every single one of us has a key to the mystery.

  And the universe is smarter than we may ever know.

  THE TERMINATOR

  (Director: James Cameron; starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield - 1984)

  James Barclay

  ‘It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or pain, or remorse. And it absolutely will not stop. Ever. Until you are dead.’

  In 1984, when I was a student in Sheffield, The Terminator came along and defined science fiction thrillers. It was James Cameron’s third feature film as a director. His previous credits were for Piranha Part Two: The Spawning (which he describes as ‘the finest flying piranha movie ever made’) and Xenogenesis, neither of which I have seen.

  Of course everyone knows The Terminator is an outstanding chase movie that spawned a massive (and inferior) sequel, but to leave it there would be to do the piece such a disservice that it is probably illegal. Because it is one thing to set out to make such a film, it is quite another to achieve it.

  The Terminator is relentless in its action, intensity and menace. It is brutal, desperate and dark; and ultimately, presents precious little hope to its audience. A look at the core of the production explains why it is still a benchmark work.

  ‘Just what you see, pal.’

  The Terminator was made in the time before CGI allowed budgets to balloon and directors to become lazy, safe in the knowledge that a wow effect would cover a yawning crack. While Cameron employed state-of-the-art animatronic and model-making effects from the Fantasy II studios for the Terminator and flash forward scenes (although to the male hero, Reese, they are flashbacks. Oh, the beauty of paradox) the bedrocks of this film are the script, cast and direction. Filmmaking in the raw. Lovely.

  The screenplay is a text book example of how to write a movie script. There is barely a wasted phrase. Well, maybe a ‘Fuck You Asshole’, but that’s about it. Every line advances plot, character, action or relationship. There’s just one scene containing exposition: Reese telling Connor what is chasing her and why she must survive. Typically for this film, rather than sit across a table to chat, they are engaged in a high speed car chase while the critical information is delivered.

  As you might expect in a movie made for a paltry $6.5m, the cast boasted but one internationally known actor – I use the term in its loosest possible sense. Arnold Schwarzenegger was a rising star, fresh from a Conan film or two, but his role as the titular cyborg propelled him to super-stardom. I’m conflicted whether we should praise Cameron for this or bury him, but what cannot be denied is that Arnie’s casting as the emotionless, expressionless, monotonic Terminator was a stroke of genius.

  Elsewhere the cast is a directory of soon-to-become genre big names on big and small screen. This film launched many a career, and why not? The Terminator assembled a superb array of little known talent. Linda Hamilton, whose portrayal of the innocent, ultra-reluctant heroine counterpoints beautifully with what is expected of her. Michael Biehn’s Kyle Reese is a hero in the classic role. A man who gives up his life to save the woman he loves, knowing he will not survive to be with her. Three class cameos add depth and humanity to the piece. Lance Henrikson and Paul Winfield, the cops who think they are on the trail of a pattern killer. And Earl Boen whose glib and sarcastic psychiatrist, Dr Silberman, was reprised in T2 and the lamentable T3. Oh, and for you talent spotters out there, the bit-part punk leader, one of those who first encounters the cyborg, is none other than Bill Paxton, who went on to steal the show as Hudson in Aliens.

  ‘One possible future… I don’t know tech stuff.’

  You could argue, then, that James Cameron had a pretty easy time of it. Not too much coaching to be done. He didn’t even have to teach Arnie… ‘Just go out there and be yourself, son.’ But the skill of a director isn’t merely in calling for action and a roll of the cameras. So we don’t just get career-defining performances. We also get oppressive lighting, a score that rumbles through the soul, keenly observe
d camera angles that add pace, emotion and close-up brutality, and an edit so sharp that the cutting room floor was surely slick with blood.

  Cameron deals deftly with events that could easily have interrupted the flow of the film. There is a love story between Reese and Connor. He has travelled back in time to be with her and to father the child who will save, he hopes, the human race. Following the brief but intensely passionate love scenes, he uses their bond to add considerable emotional collateral to the film’s denouement.

  The love story lies at the heart of the film because the child conceived goes on to lead the resistance and send his own father back in time to save his mother and hence his own life. The potential for hideous, entangling temporal paradox is huge and to allow the film to delve too far within would have been to mire it in action-defeating science. Cameron nods at the complexities the premise raises and renders time travel believable in a couple of ways.