Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 17-November-02
Spoiler Rating: High

Better Off Dead (1985)

This past week I rented what I thought, for some reason, was an overlooked 1980s teen classic, "Better Off Dead," starring John Cusack. It turns out this clunker never hit the big time for a very good reason — it sucks. Falling below the level of even the B-movie fare you might find on TV on a Sunday afternoon, this C-movie feels like nothing more than the self-indulgent personal joke of a single guy (writer/director "Savage" Steve Holland), which he tells to himself and laughs at alone.

Having spent 90 minutes watching "Better Off Dead," I initially felt that I couldn't possibly spend more time writing about it. But then I thought, Shouldn't a reviewer give some consideration to all the films she comes across, the bad as well as the good? Why did it suck so badly? What makes a movie suck? And this led me to John Cusack's other, somewhat similar movie from 1985, "The Sure Thing," which is a delightful success and one of my all-time favorites. Surely a comparison of these two films must yield some insights.

THE STORY

Taking advantage of Cusack's cute, funny face and hangdog appeal, both "Better Off Dead" and "The Sure Thing" feature him as a lovable teen with girl problems. In the former film he's Lane Myer, eldest son of an eccentric family in Northern California who is obsessed with his girlfriend, Beth (Amanda Wyss). When Beth dumps him for the conceited captain of the ski team, Lane considers suicide, plots to get Beth back, and has his head turned by Monique, the French exchange student living across the street (Diane Franklin). In the latter film, Cusack is Walter Gibson, a freshman at a New England college who heads off to California to shack up with a sexy slut but finds something deeper along the way with a classmate named Alison.

Right off the bat, "The Sure Thing" has the advantage here, as the element of the road trip provides an excellent framework around which to build the story. Gibson's progress towards Alison's heart is mirrored by their movement cross-country; since fulfillment lies at the end of the line, beckoning, the heart of the matter is not diminished by amusing sidetracks. "Better Off Dead," however, doesn't exactly have a framework; the film is a loosely bound collection of scenes that don't add up to or share in any particular goal. The title (and the blurb on the video jacket) focuses on Lane's attempts at suicide, but these are few, far between, and not at all funny. (It must have already been trite in the mid-'80s to see Lane's buddy pat him on the back for encouragement as he's leaning off a bridge, causing him to pitch forward — you guessed it — into a passing garbage truck.) The story could have been, instead, about Lane's efforts to win Beth back, but in this respect he's some talk and no action; nor does his discovery of Monique cause a conflict in the state of his affections by setting up a love triangle. In both films, you know from the beginning how the story is going end, so getting there has to be more than half the fun. Since "Better Off Dead" lacks focus, getting there feels a lot like floundering.

THE ROMANCE

Gibson and Alison spend most of "The Sure Thing" traveling in their own little sphere apart from the rest of the world, so their relationship is fully developed and never leaves the spotlight. "Better Off Dead" isn't trying to be as much of a romance (I don't think), so it uses Lane's love life more to kill time between the dumb jokes and asides. However, the movie might have benefitted if it at least committed to Beth or Monique as Lane's costar. We know that Beth is shallow and undeserving when she breaks up with him, but just as much time is spent on flashbacks of her relationship with Lane as on his newfound thing with Monique. (Which, of course, is developed over the course of about 36 hours.) And, since the film tells us bluntly that Lane is obsessively attached to Beth and experiences intense distress at losing her — and hints that Beth has misgivings over her choice towards the end — couldn't it have at least brought all of these things to a satisfying climax? After all of that supposed pain and angst (be it ever so humorous), Lane should have been more torn between the two girls, and there should have been some moment of uncertainty to justify everything that came before. Instead, Holland faintly acknowledges the requirements of his narrative by having a split second of doubt as to whether Lane will ditch Monique and return to Beth before galloping off on another absurd, inconsequential burlesque.

TEEN LIFE

Since it isn't really about the development or romance of its characters, one might assume that "Better Off Dead" is primarily concerned with spoofing the ups and downs of teen life. But this is actually a weaker point than the love stories, as, in an attempt to be as wacky as possible, "Better Off Dead" forfeits any remotely insightful view of reality. What is funny about having all the kids love geometry and adore their teacher? Is it wry or just plain ridiculous that the teacher tells Lane he's going to ask Beth out on a date? (Do I even need to bring up the fact that most of the actors look 30, at the very least?) "The Sure Thing" is about teens shading into adulthood, but it still manages to portray a picture of callow youth that seems more accurate and therefore more amusing. For parody and simple laughs, I'll take the doofus-ridden keggers, the horrible eating habits, and the one-track-mind admonishments of Gibson's friend Lance ("Every great romance starts with a one-night stand") over the stagey school dance and supposedly funny generation-gap scenes between Lane and his father.

QUIRKINESS

"Better Off Dead" aims for bigger belly laughs and more jocularity than "The Sure Thing," but in this, too, it falls short. Tapping into a highly individual wellspring of humor and utterly lacking the understanding of when to shut it off, Holland litters his movie with car chases and collisions, broken condoms, desserts that get up and walk away on their own, a grade school boy who dates trollops and builds a space shuttle in the garage, cheesy animated sequences, and David Ogden Stiers (as Lane's dad) wearing an aardvark coat. (Okay, the dessert was mildly amusing, but only because it made me think of "Calvin and Hobbes.") As for funny characters,"Better Off Dead" has a psycho paperboy, a Korean Howard Cosell impersonator, a lecherous nerd, and Lane's best friend Charles, who snorts Jello, aerosols, and snow in a pathetic search for thrills. These situations and people, not exactly amusing in and of themselves, are rendered even less amusing because they don't have any relationship to what's going on with Lane, don't highlight any theme or advance any storyline. They're just out there, substituting for a real film. All of the comic elements in "The Sure Thing" — Gibson's sex-obsessed roommate, the showtune-singing couple, the losers in the bar at Christmas, Alison's musty boyfriend Jason, and the classic scene where Gibson rescues Alison by pretending to be insane — contribute to the story not only by making us laugh, but by deepening our understanding of what makes the characters tick. Unfocused wackiness, especially of the esoteric kind seen in "Better Off Dead," does not a movie make.

CONCLUSION

While both "Better Off Dead" and "The Sure Thing" use John Cusack, teen love, and comic secondary characters in an attempt to produce a witty tale of American youth, only "The Sure Thing" succeeds. It succeeds because it has a clear notion of the story it means to tell and stays true to it, by delineating believable, interesting characters embroiled in a fully explicated romance. In addition, it generates real humor by affectionately tweaking the lives it portrays and never letting deliberately odd or contrived situations detract from the story at large. "Better Off Dead," on the other hand, is made up entirely of deliberately odd and contrived situations, and is almost completely devoid of a clear-cut story large, small, or otherwise.

All of this can be summarized in one word, which goes a long way toward defining what makes a movie suck: respect. In "The Sure Thing," director Rob Reiner displays genuine respect and even affection — for his characters, by focusing on them, fleshing them out, and leading them thoughtfully to their happy destiny, and for his audience, by recognizing that we won't care unless he shows us why we ought to. In "Better Off Dead," Savage Steve Holland gives little or no thought to his characters or his audience beyond their enabling him to tell a bunch of diverse jokes which he finds personally funny. What he produces, therefore, is something that not only lacks entertainment value, but also borders on insult.

Copyright © 2002 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.