Heathers

MOVIE #1,687 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 05.31.24 My wife and I watched this on a whim because she was going out with friends to see Heathers: The Musical and she’d never seen the movie. I was pretty sure that I’d seen it back in the day but I remembered next to nothing aside from the general premise. It’s much darker than I recalled: there is an edgelord quality to the humor that goes right up to the line of what could possibly be done in the name of satire without being blatantly offensive (some of the homophobic riffs, for example, are done in service of making of a point, but it probably won’t hold up for most viewers in 2024). Needless to say, you couldn’t make Heathers in this era and that makes it interesting, if nothing else. It mostly works because the two leads, Rider and especially Slater — who plays his absolute psychopath of a character with the casual coolness (and Jack Nicklaus aping affect) that made him a star — are both really good.

But I think it's stylistically ugly (not taking the excess of the lifestyles and culture it's ragging on far enough) and also boring for stretches. I don’t really get the cult following it’s developed: there are far better subversive 80s movies out there.

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Heathers is a 1988 American teen black comedy film written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann, in both of their respective film debuts. The film stars Winona Ryder, Christian Slater, Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker, and Penelope Milford. Its plot portrays four teenage girls—three of whom are named Heather—in a clique at an Ohio high school, one of whose lives is disrupted by the arrival of a misanthrope intent on murdering the popular students and staging their deaths as suicides. It was released on October 24, 1988.