Heathers

June 22 2009, 8:30pm

I graduated high school in 1988, so this movie sits smack-dab at some kind of crucial place for me (although, while I remember enjoying it, I don't know that I thought it was some sort of artistic breakthrough at the time . . . though we didn't have a decent movie theater in my hometown, my high school video rental habits tended towards things like Videodrome, and Blue Velvet, so Heathers wouldn't have impressed me on the outre-ness front). Watching it now, though, I can't even really get in touch with the era well enough to enjoy it as a period-piece. There are some nice elements -- the color schemes, some of the set decoration, a handful of the lines -- but overall, the script is junk. Winona, while cute, just sort of spits her lines out (as does everyone else, I suppose . . . it's kind of the only way to deliver them). As black comedy, it's neither black enough, nor fast-paced enough, to either shock or entertain (compare it to, for example, Eating Raoul -- or anything with Paul Bartel in it, for that matter). Yet I retained enough residual fondness for it to actually pick it up, and sit through it again. I suppose it's a curiosity in the same manner that certain major-label albums from that time-period are . . . the underground was simmering away, change was coming, and the mainstream was trying to react (or trying desperately *not* to react), but the result was neither fish nor fowl. So I don't know that I'd recommend it, regardless of how you felt about it (or remember having felt about it) in 1988. Trivia: Other actresses considered for one role or another in Heathers: Heather Graham, Jennifer Connelly, Justine Bateman.