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.

If You Leave

Another movie that I had a chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was Pretty in Pink. It's coming up several times over the next week on the Showtime family of channels, starting tomorrow at 4:50 PM on Showtime Women.

Molly Ringwals plays Andie, a high school senior somewhere in a part of suburbia that isn't completely homogenized. She's clearly from the poor part of town, as we see from the street sweeper operating at the beginning of the movie. She lives with her father Jack (Harry Dean Stanton), who clearly has never gotten over his wife having walked out on him and Andie and hasn't been able to hold down a steady job since. Andie makes do in part with the money she earns from her part time job at the record store with her adult friend Iona (Annie Potts).

Andie has another friend in "Duckie" (Jon Cryer). Duckie is clearly infatuated with Andie, and is doing anything he can to get her to go out with him. But Andie only likes Duckie as a friend (and she's really sincere about that), apparently not thinking at all that she would ever have a relationship with him. In fact, Duckie's incessant pursuit of Andie does cause her problems at times.

One day at the record store, a fellow student, Blane (Andrew McCarthy) comes in, supposedly looking for a record, but we can tell from the conversation that he's trying to determine whether he really is interested in her. This continues in the computer lab, with computers that seem surprisingly advanced for 1986, but that's beside the point. Blane decides that he is interested in Andie, and wants to take her on a date.

But here's the catch. Blane is from the rich part of town, where everybody lives in big houses, and the date is to go to a party at one of those houses. Andie has never even been in one of them, and when she walks in, she finds a bunch of the upper-class students who have no interest in her. Blane takes her upstairs just to talk, but runs into his friend Steff (James Spader) who has another woman in the room with him, clearly with the intention of having sex. Andie doesn't want to be at the party any more, but doesn't want Blane to take her home, because she absolutely doesn't want him to see where she lives.

Blane still loves Andie, and even invites her to the prom, the big event of the year at any high school. But Steff starts working on Blane, suggesting that Blane is likely to suffer ostracism from the other rich kids if he's seen too much with poor Andie. Blane decides to tell Andie he had already promised to take somebody else to the prom, which is of course complete BS, after Andie's father already spent good money on a prom dress. What's a girl like Andie to do?

I have to admit that I'm a couple of years too young for the John Hughes (he wrote the screenplay but didn't actually direct this one) 80s teen movies, having graduated high school in 1990, and only getting to ee them well into adulthood. I also have to admit that I don't quite recognize my own high school experience in Pretty in Pink, mostly because I was definitely neither Duckie nor Blane. I came from one of the more blue-collar parts of the school district, and while we did have a decidedly upper-middle-class section due to having an IBM facility in the district, the economic difference wasn't quite as stark as in Pretty in Pink. Yet, I can still see how a lot of people would identify more than I did, and to an extent I did feel some of the class differences.

The performances are quite good, especially Jon Cryer. He's irritating, although that's because the script requires it. Spader is also very good, even if he looks much too old to be a high school student. Stanton and Potts do well with the supporting adult roles. If you want an interesting look back at high school and the 1980s, then I can highly recommend Pretty in Pink.

I had held off on doing a blog post on Pretty in Pink because one of the times I checked, it seemed to be out of print on DVD. But the movie recently (a couple of weeks ago) received a Blu-ray release, and you can find it on Amazon streaming too.

Did anybody know any teens like that?

I find some of the teen movies from the 1950s so interesting just because they seem so warped, as if there was never this sort of reality. The adults may have thought this was reality, but I have a tough time believing it, in part because I don't remember high school being like this for me or any of my friends. A good example of this is Blue Denim, which is airing tomorrow at 1:00 PM on the Fox Movie Channel.

Brandon de Wilde stars as Arthur, a teenager whom nobody in his family understands. His father, a strict army veteran played by Macdonald Carey, complains about Arthur's grades and just to show how little he understands his son, took the elderly family dog to the vet to have it put to sleep without taking the son. Arthur's sister is getting married, so she and mom have no time for him. It seems as if the only person who does have time for Arthur is his not-so-good-influence friend Ernie, played by Warren Berlinger (in real life five years de Wilde's senior). He drinks, smokes, and gambles with Arthur, and seems to know a bit more about the world.

And then there's Janet, Arthur's girlfriend, played by the lovely Carol Lynley. The two want to be oh-so-adult, and to them this means experimenting with sex. In some ways, they seem not to know the finer points about how to satisfy a partner. But they certainly know how to get a girl knocked up, as we eventually learn that Janet is pregnant. Oops. What's a teenage boy to do, especially one who thinks nobody understands him? Well, Ernie heard that there's somebody on the other side of town who knows where you can get a procedure that will deal with these things. This being the 1950s, they can't say the word "abortion" in a Hollywood movie, but you get the point.

Blue Denim alternates between being an unintenional hoot, and tedious beyond belief. Brandon de Wilde isn't as bad as Julie Harris in Member of the Wedding, and Berlinger is generally just a jerk. Lynley is lovely to look at, and all of the adults are one-dimensional. It's the sort of thing that you might have seen on one of those "After School Specials" that the networks ran back in the 1970s and 1980s. Watch it once just for a laugh, but that's about it.