Quick Thoughts - The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

11/16/13: I'm not sure how much of this film I actually understood, or how much I was even supposed to understand. Buckaroo Bonzai is a famous surgeon who is also a stunt man, who also headlines a rock band, who finds himself busting out his dead wife's doppelganger from prison after she tries to kill him. From there he gets tangled in an interplanetary conflict with aliens from another dimension, which the film somehow ties to Orson Welles' presentation of War of the Worlds. The manic absurdity is nearly kept in check by absolute committal by its oddly respectable cast and sincere filmmaking form director W.D. Richter. It's leagues beyond convoluted, and would be total garbage if it weren't so beautifully trashy... In other words, it's Grade A cult material. **1/2

Piranha - ***

Boobs, blood, and more boobs. Not usually the best combination, but somehow Alexandre Aja fits it all together for some outstanding entertainment in the new Piranha film. It's easily one of the thinnest plots ever conceived: seismic activity ruptures the floor of a lake near the shore of a small town during Spring Break, and thousands of highly evolved piranha come out to feed. Finally a film that knows not only to be dumb, but also how to be dumb. It has no pretensions about being great, or even having any kind of plot resolution, but instead it's eight minutes of set-up, probably two of which feature a fantastically whacked-out Christopher Lloyd, and then eighty minutes of climax. And it's refreshing to see a retro drive-in style horror movie made with sincerity, without any purposefully silly Grindhouse-like winks at the audience. It's exactly what it needs to be. The boobs are big, the CGI is terrible, the blood flows by the gallon, and it's all genuinely fun. Apparently that's not an easy task, because I don't think I've seen anyone actually pull it off since Aja did it with The Hills Have Eyes a few years ago.