Heathers (1989) Review
“Dear Diary, my teen-angst bullshit now has a body count.”
When it comes to 1980’s teen movies, Heathers is the weird stepchild of the bunch. It still counts in the category, but it doesn’t exactly fit in, and it ended up less loved and less appreciated.
(I say that with all sympathy to weird stepchildren. Much like Heathers, my feelings towards you are mostly positive, and what’s leftover is just a little of confusion).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to pass off Heathers as an unknown gem. It’s made plenty of best teen film lists and built a following over time, but not only was it off to a rocky start (it’s box office was $1.1 million on a $3 million dollar budget), it just didn’t make it into the collective pop-culture memory in the same way dancing on the table Breakfast Club-style or running through backyards like Ferris Bueller did.
And that’s because this is a weird movie. Veronica Sawyer (played by Winona Ryder, who has been killing on it Stranger Things for three straight seasons but was always great) is in a clique with the popular girls (all named Heather) at an Ohio high school. Veronica is with them, but not of them (this is in fact is very subtly hinted by the fact that her name is not Heather). Veronica is introspective. Veronica is dark. Veronica is cynical, but not so cynical she’s a drag for you, the audience, to watch. Events are incited when JD (Christian Slater from Mr. Robot and Archer, well before peak-coolness, but holding his own), moves to town. His character introduction involves pulling out a pistol in the lunchroom and aiming it at some jocks. It was loaded with blanks, but… still.
This is a not movie that you could make today. In fact, they tried to make it a show a few years back, and it very predictably failed. That might have a lot to do with translating the original’s kind of violence to a modern high school setting, or it could have had a lot to do with making the Heathers villainy based on their “wokeness” (they’re apparently “bullying” people with their body positivity, gender queerness, and being biracial), which sounds like I’m making up a deliberately bad example of television, but unfortunately is a real, actual thing.
Yeah, the show is to be ignored.
Anyway, Veronica starts hanging out with JD and losing status with Heather Chandler (a proto-Regina George from Mean Girls) and starting up a relationship with JD. Heather annoys JD a little too much, and then… well, see the above quote about the body count.
I’ll leave the who’s and how’s of the death toll in this movie a mystery, but the violence is inevitable in this film, and also the most difficult part of the film to wrap your head around. Is it just there for drama? Is it metaphorical, and we’re meant to take the actual murders in the story as stand-ins for the damage that teenage cruelty and callousness causes? Is it a joke? Because… several times it’s a joke. At one point a character lights their cigarette off a deadly explosion. It’s a very silly shot in a movie with a fair number of dead teens. And that murkiness, I think, is where the film stumbles. Because Lord knows Ryder and Slater kill it in this one, and the soundtrack is suitably eerie but fun, and there’s some really funny moments here.
That’s also why I think the musical adaptation from 2014 is better. That one manages to play both the drama and the dark comedy of killing off its cast together (occasionally with a South Park-ian sense of humor), making Veronica more relatable and JD more complex and interesting. Plus, some of the songs are catchy as hell. I could blast “Freeze Your Brain” and “Big Fun” all day.
Overall, the film is fun and interesting, provided you know what you’re getting into. The tone isn’t exactly consistent, and the message is a little jumbled, but it’s dark and weird and very, very memorable. It’s streaming on Hulu. 3.8 out of 5 slushies. Give it a shot.