Heathers (1989)

reviewed by
Laurie D. T. Mann


                                  HEATHERS
                       A film review by Laurie Mann
                        Copyright 1991 Laurie Mann

I've been depressed and overworked lately, and looked for a comedy at the video store. Even though it was about teenagers and suicide (not two of my favorite subjects) I rented HEATHERS. It was a very erratic black comedy, but worthwhile, particularly if you like Winona Ryder or Christian Slater, or if you hated high school.

Parts of HEATHERS are very dreamlike, and these parts are intercut by fairly accurate portrayals of the chaos of high school. Ryder plays the confident of a group of vacuous high school girls, all of whom are named Heather. Ryder is fascinated by Slater, the bad, new kid at school, and son of a man who blows up buildings for a living. After one of the Heathers embarrasses her, Ryder decides to take her revenge. But the revenge turns out to be a murder, and it's "rearranged" to look like a suicide.

The movie is a little ragged on the edges, but its portrayal of the mind set of high school students and teachers is right on the money. And both Ryder and Slater turn in terrific performances.

Laurie Mann
lmann%jjmhome@m2c.m2c.org
NeXT Mail: lmann@vineland.pubs.stratus.com
.

The review above was posted to the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due to ASCII to HTML conversion.

Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews