Heathers (1988) – Review

To accurately snag an entire generation into worshiping your teen movie, it helps to remember a few things: you probably shouldn’t attempt to talk down to your audience as their bullshit detectors are working overtime at that age; teens can be vicious little shits and this must be embraced and also, kids will always find humour in even the darkest of subject matters.
Nailing every single one of these points and therefore standing tall as one of the greatest teen cult movies around is Michael Lehmann’s Heathers, a groundbreaking satire that took in all the usual targets of obnoxious bitchy cliques, clueless parents, do-gooding school councillors and tempestuous romances with the local bad boy all processed through the snappy inner monologue of a sardonic female lead. However, the movie also takes aim at some delightfully dark material such as teen suicides and school shootings. To say that the world hasn’t exactly learned from Heathers is an understatement, but in a cruelly amusing way that true Heathers fans will understand – it only makes the movie funnier. Or to quote Heather no. 1, Fuck me gently with a Chainsaw, do I look like Mother Teresa?

Veronica Sawyer is a member of the popular but tyrannical clique that rules the hallways of Westerburg Highschool that are popularly known as the Heathers, but she is growing increasingly despondent about the way Heather Duke, Heather McNamara and their leader, Heather Chandler treat those they deem beneath them – what, you thought they were called The Heathers because they like a particular type of shrub?
However, her longing for a simpler time when she would hang out with the nicer friends from her childhood is put on the back burner when the impossibly charismatic Jason Dean turns up at her school and immediately makes a name for himself when he pulls an unloaded gun on a couple of bullying jocks in the cafeteria. While most people would run a mile at the sight of a gun totting student on a long black coat, Veronica is drawn to his nihilistic outlook on life that’s been forged by a mother who committed suicide and a mogul father who is uncomfortably enthusiastic about explosives.
After a night out where Veronica angers Chandler by refusing to sleep with a member of a frat and then accidently vomits on her, the prime Heather vows to destroy her life, but to counteract it, J.D. and Veronica aim to give a harmless concoction to make her sick in return. However J.D. – that mischievous little psycho – has switch mugs “accidently” so the Heather actually drinks drain cleaner and promptly dies in in their panic, he convinces Veronica to forge a suicide note to cover up the fact that a flat out murder has just been committed.
But a bizarre thing happens. Due to the popularity of Heather Chandler, the nature of her “suicide” makes the community only worship her more and thus a string of comical misunderstandings, public hypocrisy and yet more “suicides” starts to unfold. But when things start to reach critical mass, Veronica has to maybe accept that her complicated new boyfriend may just be an out and out serial killer.

I have to be honest, I never managed to catch Heathers at a time before virtually everything that happens in it frequently pops up in the news or at least a social media post literally every single day, so I have no idea if that makes watching it late makes more or less funnier if I’d seen it back in the 80s, but regardless of that, there’s no denying that Heathers may be one of the smartest, savviest and downright brutal teen movies of its kind ever made. Essentially taking the weaponized angst of the cadre of John Hughes teen movies release prior and warping them with a punk rock, fuck you attitude that still baffling warm, the movie literally stands at the meeting point between every teen movie made before and every teen movie made since. You don’t get the razor sharp, exagerated absurdity of Clueless or Mean Girls without the trio of rich pitches known as the Heathers, but similarly where do you think Diablo Cody’s career would have gone if not for the kooky, monocle wearing, cigarette puffing sight of Winnona Ryder’s Veronica?

The fact that Lehmann’s movie goes so fucking dark while retaining a chirpy smile on its face can’t be downplayed either as a multitude of shocking subjects join teen suicide and murder as the story also forces rape, sex, homophobia, bullying and even a mass bombing down our throats like bright blue draino. However, while all this could be simply written off as shock tactics, Heathers’ script ensures that it’s covered by not only being ruthlessly quotable (“My teen angst has a body count.” Is a fucking all timer), by actually being genuinely and insightfully funny. While you’d have a devil of a time getting the scene where J.D. and Veronica guns down two alpha male, toxic, rapey jocks and switches the evidence around to make it seem like a homosexual suicide pact is about as close to the bone as you can get (a father’s outburst of “I love my dead gay son” is another example of how that dialogue cuts likeca scalpel); as is the moment when the failure of overweight Martha to end her life is mocked as her not bring popular enough to actually pull it off.
However, while the hypocrisy of making martyrs of awful people just because you believe they died in a certain way is ripe for a dark comedy, none of it would have worked half as well if the cast didn’t commit. While the movie skirts a little too naive about exactly how easily led Veronica is by J.D. at first, the crowned queen of kook, Winona Ryder is so on her fucking game (never forget, Beetlejuice came out the same year) that you never truly bring up her culpability as she carries the film with her sardonic tone. However, it certainly helps that along side her is Christian Slater’s J.D., a truly fascinating nihilist who seems to be the result of dumping James Dean, a young Jack Nicholson and the unabomber into a blender and the resulting creation is a swaggering incel who radiates arguably the greatest “I-can-fix-him” energy of the entire decade. And yet it all works as it skewers endless targets with the confidence of a high school student convinced that they’re utterly invulnerable despite all evidence to the contrary.

I’m not a huge, teen movie kind of guy; but in the midst of a genre that includes such heavyweights as The Breakfast Club, Easy A, Superbad, Clueless, Juno, Pretty In Pink, Mean Girls and Jennifer’s Body, Heathers has the teeth and the balls to still remain evergreen when it comes to balancing the trauma of growing up with how much fun it is to take the piss out if it.
How very.
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