Better Off Dead (Savage Steve Holland, 1985): USA

Reviewed by Byron Potau.  Viewed on DVD.

If you have ever felt the pain of rejection, the longing for an ex who dumped you and Valentine’s Day is just making it all worse, then feel free to laugh it all off this Valentine’s with this eighties comedy, Better Off Dead, that pokes fun at obsessive and shallow high school relationships and crushes.

John Cusack is Lane Meyer, a typical high school kid obsessed with his girlfriend, Beth (Amanda Wyss).  When she callously breaks up with him to go out with someone more popular, Lane will do anything to win her back including skiing the certain death slope, the K-12.  With the help of the pretty French foreign exchange student Monique (Diane Franklin) from across the street (who, unbeknownst to him, has a crush on him), he might be able to do it. But then again, suicide just might be the answer. 

Writer/director Savage Steve Holland fills the film with little gems of humor like Lane’s mom (Kim Darby), whose every cooked meal turns to green sludge, Lane’s friend Charles (played by Curtis Armstrong) who cannot score real drugs in his town and so tries to get high on snorting jello and pure snow, and Lane’s brother Badger (Scooter Stevens) who successfully applies the lessons learned in the book he orders, “How to Pick Up Trashy Women.”  John Cusack is perfectly charming in one of his earliest and best roles as the lovesick, obsessive, and suicidal Lane.  There is a strange little stop-motion animation sequence with a hamburger playing Van Halen, but aside from this the film is consistently and creatively funny, a true classic of the eighties, and a reminder not to take all this relationship stuff too seriously.