Movie Review: Better Off Dead (1985) directed by Savage Steve Holland
Al Meyer (David Ogden Stiers) is a lawyer in the small Northern California town of Greendale, a short drive away from the mountains. Life is rough for him. His wife Jenny (Kim Darby) is an improbably bad cook who refuses to stop trying and is generally a ditz. His younger son Badger (Scooter Stevens) is a voluntarily mute genius with zero interest in making life easy for anyone but himself. And his older son Lane (John Cusack) is a lazy sad sack who’s dangerously infatuated with his girlfriend Beth Truss (Amanda Wyss). Plus, the windows in his garage door keep getting broken, most often by the bratty but persistent newsboy (Demian Slade). It would be no surprise if he snapped one day.
But enough about the character I most sympathize with. The actual protagonist is Lane, who has a stalker-level fixation on Beth and has built his current lifestyle entirely around their six-month relationship. Beth, as it turns out, is far less invested in the relationship, and throws Lane over for high school bully ski captain Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier) as soon as the latter shows an interest. Lane’s life is otherwise a series of humiliations, so it’s no surprise that he turns suicidal. Even the help of his drug-obsessed friend Charles de Mar (Curtis Armstrong) who cannot actually get illegal substances in Greendale fails to bring Lane’s spirits up.
Meanwhile next door, French exchange student Monique Junot (Diane Franklin) is dismayed to discover that her host, Mrs. Smith (Laura Waterbury) expects Monique to be a live-in girlfriend for her socially inept and unpleasant-looking son Ricky (Dan Schneider). Monique resorts to pretending she speaks no English whatsoever to get out of sticky situations as much as possible.
This 80s dark comedy film is apparently a fond memory of a certain subgroup of people who were teenagers at the time. I’d class it as “magic realism” as while it never expressly admits to being fantasy, highly improbable to impossible things keep happening and everyone just rolls with it.
Good: There’s some nice skiing scenes, and unlike some other ski comedies, they don’t overstay their welcome.
The super persistent newsboy trying to collect his two dollars is genuinely hilarious. A number of the other jokes land too, and if I had seen this in the 1980s I might have laughed at more of them.
Innovative use of 2-D and stop motion animation.
Less good: A fair bit of the comedy is the gross-out variety I am uncomfortable with. The sexual/gender dynamics of the story are…dated. Lane is only sympathetic by virtue of being the underdog and slightly less awful a person than Ricky or Roy, without any positive character traits of his own.
Sad: The actor who plays the Korean immigrant who learned to speak English by imitating Howard Cosell worked really hard on his Cosell imitation, but then just got dubbed over by Rich Little. I mean, sure, Rich Little does an amazing Cosell, but still.
Content note: Attempted suicide, played for laughs. Roy bullies Lane, and it’s clear that he’s pushing Beth around too once they start dating. Ricky inflicts unwanted touching on Monique, and his mother is okay with this. A girl is forcibly stripped to her underwear in public, played for laughs. Underage smoking and drinking. Psuedo-drug use. Ethnic stereotyping.
Overall: It’s not a bad movie, really, but sorely dated in spots and this detracts from the good bits. Recommended primarily to viewers who were teens in the Eighties, or just a little younger so they couldn’t see this in movie theaters.
