Heathers

Now that we're getting back to the regular calendar following the Christmas and New Year's holidays and students are going back to school, it's an appropriate time to do a post on one of the darkest teen comedies you'll ever see: Heathers.

Some years back when I did a post on the Michael Caine/Elizabeth Taylor movie X, Y, and Zee, I mentioned how the opening credits looked so obviously phony. Heathers has that same look, but in a completely different way. Four high school girls are playing croquet at the house of Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder), who lives in Sherwood, a wealthy suburb of one of the big cities of Ohio, although I don't think which one is mentioned or even matters. The three girls with whom Veronica is playing are all named Heather, and they've formed a clique that seems to run the high school together with the jocks, notably football players Kurt and Ram. They're also a particularly brutal clique led by Heather Chandler (Kim Walker) with Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty) and Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) being subordinate.

Their bullying is mean even by today's standards, at least until the football players come into the one student who doesn't give a shit, Jason Dean (Christian Slater), who has gotten the obvious nickname J.D. When the Kurt and Ram try to bully him, he responds by pulling a gun on them and shooting blanks. Veronica, who has been trying to get into the popular Heathers clique, is intrigued by the behavior, and J.D. keeps showing up in Veronica's life.

One night, Veronica gets to go to a frat party at the local college together with Chandler, and finds that it's not particularly to her liking, while Chandler gets drunk enough to be hung over the next morning. J.D., who sort of rescued Veronica after the frat party, takes Vernoica over to Chandler's house, ostensibly to help Chandler deal with her hangover. Veronica whips up a concoction of milk and orange juice, while J.D. finds a bottle of drain cleaner under the sink and morbidly suggests giving some of that to Chandler. Somehow, the drain cleaner winds up in the mug that Veronica was preparing, and Chandler dies!

J.D. is a fairly quick thinker, and manipulates Veronica into forging a suicide note in Chandler's handwriting. While it deflects attention away from the idea that what J.D. and Veronica did was murder, it also serves to make Chandler more popular as all those easily-swayed teenagers think there's some deep meaning in what Chandler did, not knowing of course what really happened.

And it's only going to get worse. Kurt and Ram try to humiliate Veronica, and J.D. devises a plan to shoot both of them dead and forge another suicide note to make it look like Kurt and Ram were actually gay lovers who offed themselves because they couldn't take the rampant homophobia that accompanies football culture. However, the plan doesn't quite work, and it leads Veronica to realize that J.D. is actually a psychopath and that she and everybody else in town may be in danger.

Heathers is, as I said at the beginning, an extremely dark comedy. I would have been a junior in high school when it was first released, but never got to see it back in those days. (My high school was never like this.) Now that I'm much older, I'm clearly no longer in the target demographic for the movie. But it's still the sort of dark humor which I tend to enjoy a lot. As a result, it should go without saying that I loved Heathers.

However, I wouldn't be surprised if there are some people out there who don't care for this sort of humor. It's also clearly not a movie that's appropriate for families. But there's a reason why it's become a bit of a cult classic in the 35 years since its release. Definitely give it a watch if you haven't seen it before.