I've been a big fan of movies for a long time, since when I first went to the cinema, to be exact (to watch this movie!), and sadly, I was also rather opinionated from more or less the beginning. I would always bore my friends with my 'knowledge' of movies, which I took from what little movie programmes there were on Dutch television at the time. I also read reviews in the newspapers (but I never understood why movies like Police Academy got such bad reviews, while movies I never heard, these so-called art-films, were always praised) and the monthly Mickey Mouse magazine I subscribed to, and took the opinions from those sources to tell my friends which movies to watch and which not. It got so bad that at a time I would just more or less badmouth any movie that they came up with that I had never heard ("I never heard of it, so it simply cannot be good"), but this luckily ended when I started to realise that some of these movies might actually be pretty good. One of the movies that made me realize that was Better Off Dead, which isn't that independent at all, but which bypassed all my sources of movie information nonetheless, And which turned out to be hilarious when I first caught it on video.
Better Off Dead is a high school movie, but one with much more of an edge than any of the other high school comedies that came out at the time (we're speaking halfway 80's here). It's about a kid from high school who is out of luck. He's depressed, and when his girlfriend breaks up with him because she is now going out with the skiing champion of the class, he tries to commit suicide several times (of course, with no luck). In the end, he decides to try and win his old flame back by winning a big skiing tournament, not realising that he is actually falling for the cute French exchange student that's supporting him in his quest.
The storyline behind Better Off Dead is really not that much different from other high school movies (save the fact that in those other movies the lead character normally doesn't try to kill himself), but the movie has so much more going for it. First of all, it has John Cusack in one of his first big leading roles, showing us that goofy charm that made him such a big star later on. It also has Cusack's character Lane Meyer blowing up the woman next door, Lane's moms cooking literally getting a life of it's own, Lane's paperboy making bigger and bigger threats on his life if he does not pay him soon, Lane's little brother who has more success with women than he has, Diane Franklin as a very cute French exchange student, and the ever reliable Curtis Armstrong as Lane's drug crazed best friend.
Yeah, you probably should have seen this movie to understand why it's so much fun to watch. If you ever catch it on TV, or find the DVD in a sale at your local store, then Better Off Dead is definitely a movie to check out. At times it's pretty dark for a movie in this genre, and it's frequently genuinely laugh out loud funny. It might not be as classic as something like Weird Science, but it's definitely a movie you won't forget once you've seen it.
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