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Heathers (Limited Edition Tin)Rating:
Release Date: 25 September, 2001 Retail Price: $39.98 Sorry, this product is not currently available. Cast: Complete Cast (9 total) |
Heathers (Limited Edition Tin) Reviews
Swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads in the world of the "Heathers"
"Entertainment Weekly" came out this week with its list of "The 50 Best High School Movies Ever." I noticed that I had seen 42 of the 50 films and had actually missed one in the top 10, namely #6 "Heathers" ("You've never seen 'Heathers'?" my wife asked in shock, "It's a cult classic"). So I quickly took steps to rectify that shortcoming. "EW" describes this 1989 film as "the antithesis of the earnest '80s Hughes film," which would mean such fare as "The Breakfast Club," which is the #1 film on this list, along with "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (#10), "Pretty in Pink" (#26), and "Sixteen Candles" (#50). Once that comparison is fostered, it is hard not imagine the characters created by writer Daniel Waters running around in the Hughes universe wrecking havoc.
The reason it is ironic that I have not seen "Heathers" is because it is a black comedy and I really love black comedies, which are usually hard to pull off. Our young heroine is Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), who hangs around with Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk), and Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty), the original mean girls at Westerberg High in Ohio. Veronica is no longer happy hanging with the Heathers and she finds an unexpected ally in J.D. (Christian Slater), whose response to the school bullies Kurt (Lance Fenton) and Ram (Patrick Labyorteux), is to pull a gun on them and fire blanks at them (thereby ruining two pairs of blue jeans).
However, Veronica and J.D. have different ideas about what constitutes appropriate payback, so when she wants to give the first Heather something to make her throw up, J.D. substitutes something that will make her fall down dead. That requires a suicide note to cover up the death, and now Heather has killed her best friend/worst enemy and brought Westerberg High to the surreal world of teen suicide. This is the darkest part of this black comedy, and the ineptitude of schools to deal with the aftermath let along the causes of such tragedies is nicely filleted here. Meanwhile, J.D. is getting a taste for this way of making high school a better place and Veronica is slow to catch on to his real agenda.
What I like about "Heathers" is the message that I see embedded in it, to wit, even if you were to indulge your darkest fantasies and off an obnoxious classmate, that is not going to make the world a better place. Not only is there another Heather around to take the place of the one you got rid of, but also hypocrisy runs rampant as people suddenly have nothing but nice things to say about the dead students they all hated. The ending is the weakest part of the film because once you deal with cliques, teen suicide and everything else it is hard to come up with a big finish (and we already saw the kids blow up the school in "Rock 'n' Roll High School," #18). There is the implicit idea that at some time in the past Veronica and the Heathers had more realistic friendships with the students that they now ridicule and terrorize, and the end of the movie explicitly endorses that being a better way.
Most high school movies go for the laughs without necessarily making some sort of point worth making, let alone indulging in this much black humor and absurdity. "Mean Girls" (#12) covers the same territory as "Heathers," but keeps it real in an effort to actually teach something, while "Heathers" renders its judgment and rubs your face in the fact that is just the way things are in high school, without any pretensions a real world solution exists. There are other high school movies that engage in satire, like "Donnie Darko" (#14), "Rushmore" (#24), and "The Virgin Suicides," but none of those films are playing this close to the heart of the genre. So, where do I go from here? I do not know that I can find Frederick Wiesman's documentary "High School" (#13), but I will be checking out "Lucas" (#16) and "Cooley High" (#23) to get me past the 90% mark. Besides, it is probably time I see more than the bathtub scene from "Splendor in the Grass" (#50).
Good Movie
I remember watching this movie a few years back. I thought it was decent overall. But my biggest question is if Jason hated the world so much, why didn't he blow himself up inside the gym?
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