The moment a guy pulls a gun out in the middle of a
cafeteria, shoots people with blanks, and everyone seems to just shrug it off
matter of factly is when you should realize Heather
doesn’t exactly want you to always take seriously everything that’s taking
place.
Veronica (Winona Ryder) befriends the popular clique of the
Heathers (Shannen Doherty, Lisanne Falk, Kim Walker) three attractive mean girls all with the same name who dominate social
life. Veronica thought she wanted to gain popularity and power at the school,
but she’s two smart and subversive to truly belong to the Heathers. She’s
getting fed up with all their bashing and pranking of the geeks and outcasts,
which they’re making her an accessory to.
Enter J.D. (Jason Slater) a pretty boy rebel with an odd
sense of humor who wants knock the Heathers down a peg as much as she does.
This is where Heathers increasingly enters into the realm of
the absurd and surreal. The satire remains but it becomes broader and darker. When
the de facto leader of the Heathers pisses Veronica off, she decides she’ll give
her a bad hangover cure that’ll make her throw up. J.D., on the other hand,
suggests giving her drainage fluid; she, ouf course, refuses this idea and
takes it as a joke. However, when Veronica mistakenly picks up the cup
containing the poison, J.D. simply smirks and purposely fails to tell her.
Heather drops dead and the two scramble to make her death look like a suicide.
The fake suicide ends up turning Heather into a fallen
martyr; she suddenly has depth no one could have imagined, and she now has a
hold over the school that’s even stronger than when she was alive. AKA the
exact opposite thing they could have hoped for. Veronica could have swallowed
the death if it actually brought greater equality in the school, but everyone
acts like vultures, picking off the suicide for their own benefit and gain.
J.D. has bizarre control over Veronica; she doesn’t want to
harm anyone else, but he keeps convincing her to take the lives of other people.
But, hey, it’s only popular kids who’d be making life miserable for the
majority of people. When Veronica just can’t be part of this anymore with a
clean conscience, well, J.D. doesn’t take it too kindly.
There are films that I claim are fun but that I personally
don’t find to be fun; however, these types of films are the ones that I could definitely
see other people getting a lot of enjoyment out of and it’s why I frame the
reviews in that way. This is not the case with Heathers which is one of those films that I’m not feigning how much
I liked it. It’s a film that’s frequently hilarious with its apocalyptic sensibilities
and sharp, intelligent satire. It could have stayed the course as a typical
teen film about a girl realizing she wants nothing to do with the popular kids
anymore and embracing other subcultures and life outside the it crowd, but, by
allowing itself to go into murkier, off the beaten path territory, it turns the
film into something far more interesting and memorable, even if it’s not always
well-executed. There’s a fair amount of caricature here, there’s plenty you
have to accept at face value in order to buy into the premise, and that ending feels slightly tacked on, but by refusing
to be a traditional teen movie, Heathers
become something far more peerless and gratifying than it would have otherwise.
Grade: B+
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