W.D. Richter

Oddly, the movie I kept thinking of was “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension,’’ the 1984 cult film in which just as much happens and just as outrageously with just as little effect.

The character of Buckaroo started as a sprig of an idea in the mind of W.D. Richter, who found a screenwriting hot hand in the late 1970s with reinventions of “Dracula” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” as well as the Robert Redford prison drama “Brubaker.”

Guardians of the Galaxy plays less like a Marvel Studios commodity and more like a two-hundred-million-dollar version of 1980’s sci-fi cable staples like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension or The Ice Pirates.

The villain (James Hong) appears first as a smirky hobo, then resplendent in Ming the Merciless robes, then a pissy Methusela in a wheelchair, yearning to be made flesh following millenniums as an apparition; the heroes enter a warehouse and end up in the "Hell of Upside Down Souls" ("the Chinese have a lot of hells"), while Kim Cattrall breezes through to buttress Only Angels Have Wings in Carpenter's pop magpie foundations, which also include Year of the Dragon, Blood Alley, The Magic Blade, Hair-Raising Hare, etc. W.D. Richter worked on the screenplay, and Russell lovingly evokes the spirit of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension by firing his gun into the air before a showdown and getting knocked unconscious by falling debris; for the rest, Richter's loopy jokes receive Carpenter's unerring formalist elegance, the villain's lair has a cocktail lounge where the intrepid warriors mix magic potion and neon skulls adorn sinister subterranean ceremonies.