Heathers

I love Winona Ryder. After that whole Mr. Deeds/shoplifting one-two fiascos she went missing. Pity since her smart-but-slacker quirky girl vibe always intrigued me. Here I am convinced that she is just playing a variation of herself. But it works like gangbusters. She’s funny, dark and appropriately complicated. Heathers was her big coming out party.

By now everyone should know the basic gist of the storyline: Goth former outcast Veronica gets in with the most popular clique in school – the Heathers, learns to regret it, gets romantically involved with a sociopath, chaos and subversion ensue. This isn’t John Hughes’ high school movie. This is an unwieldy beast that is both very disturbing and extremely hilarious. At times painfully accurate to the experiences and senses that I remember about high school; and at other times completely and utterly deranged. It doesn’t hurt that before there was such a thing as Mean Girls or Diablo Cody there was this immensely quotable screenplay. My favorite? Well, I’d say that it was “If you want to fuck with the eagles you’ve got to learn to fly.” But “I love my dead gay son” does have its own hilarious edge.

The most venom comes courtesy of former teen pin-up Christian Slater. There is such a thing as a short shelf life for teen idols and their looks, but Slater was only swoon worthy and kinda sexy in this movie. He’s also completely and totally insane. I want to believe that there’s some kind of psychological depth being explored in his character, but I think that they were just aiming for b-movie/cult figure head. He’s the most like a John Waters character.

The semi-happy ending is a bit confusing to talk about in the rest of the film’s context. Yes, a revamp of the societal hierarchy in high school is a great thing. But coming after so much death, violence, sex, drugs and one-liners (sounds like a typical high school, no?) done in the darkest black of black comedies feels odd. There’s no other word for it. But Heathers has deservedly become a cult classic. If you haven’t seen this at least three times by now, what’s your damage?