User Reviews

This deserving cult classic is still as crisp and contemporary 20 years later as it was when it came out (actually, I can only guess how much impact it had upon its release; I was only 10 at the time and probably wouldn't have understood the high school dichotomy even if I had seen the film then). The blood-black humor is still as biting and sharp as ever, and the best lines still induce morbid laughter ("I love my dead gay son" is a personal favorite). And a top-notch cast of 80's actors who really deserved to end up doing more with their careers (except the ones who actually DID do more, most of whom should have stopped right here) carried this material with such grace, the film really hasn't aged at all.

There is a timeless feel to Heathers, and it's something that definitely struck me watching this film today. Here's the confession: I am writing this review after watching Heathers for the first time. Of course, I had heard about this film for years, but somehow it stayed out of my DVD library until just recently. After finally taking in this much lauded classic, I'm sorry I waited so long.

But, perhaps approaching this film with today's eyes lends a useful gauge of its true effectiveness. After all, I watched the film simply to watch it, and I had no historical or sentimental ties to it to cloud my judgment of exactly how much I enjoyed it. The fact that Heathers is so great, despite the fact that it came out of an era during which high school films were made in a very specific mode, thus have mostly aged very poorly, speaks volumes about its quality.

Let me explain... Picture teen films made in the 90's during that dark period where pagers, not cell phones, were the apex of communications. Of course, all the hip kids at the time would have a pager, so naturally, references to this ultra-modern form of technology would enter into the plot, or at least the peripheral. Someone watching a film from this period today would immediately notice this antiquated device, and the film would then date itself. Heathers has no such attachments to its era, and in fact, it looks very little like any high school film made in the 80's (or ever, actually). The use of almost no music in the film adds to this mystique, and since there's no Simple Minds song guiding the action, we can't quite place the Heathers' link to popular culture there. Ditto with the fashion, which, aside from some pretty intense hair-dos, doesn't place our characters into any historical context. The teens in this film don't strut around in legwarmers or Member's Only jackets, and even if they did, this would have an ironic coolness about it in today's retro culture.

I only point this out to demonstrate that Heathers seemed to have much more on its mind than entertaining teens for a couple of hours. It takes significant forethought to omit anything that places significance on the time and place the story unfolds and focus all of the elements on the darkly delightful story instead. Heathers wouldn't work nearly as well, or apply so encompassingly, if it tied itself to a singular post of time. One of the reasons the film holds up so well today is that it looks like it could have very well been made today. This fact makes the rumors I've heard of a remake in the works one of the worst ideas of all time... and that's really saying a lot considering how many classic films have been tainted by a wretched modern make-over/cash-in (oh, that's right... we're supposed to call them "re-imaginings").

You can easily find the plot and any other pertinent information on the very listing you browsed to come to this review, and certainly Heathers is a film that has been discussed so much that I won't be able to add any significant perspective to it. Rest assured, I won't try.

I'm only here to say that I finally watched Heathers, and found it deserving off all the hype that I've encountered in the decades this film has existed. The satire is cutting and brilliant and the themes are universal, and will remain universal as long as there are millions of insecure teenagers on this planet vying for the ever-present enigma of "acceptance". Hell, most adults are still searching for that themselves, which would sort of make Heathers a film that grows up with you. That's no simple feat, and the very fact that 20 year-old jokes about mass murder are still funny today says as much about humanity as the film does about the dynamics of popularity.

I'll admit I arrived to the party late, but I can assure you this: it won't take another 20 years for me to watch this again.

Michael Lehmann's film 'Heathers' is a hard one to rate. It is a very dark comedy that wouldn't be funny at all if it weren't for little moments and certain characters. Much of the humor, as seen by the writers, is geared towards older teen-agers but there are moments that are very much for the adults; like the cynical teachers smoking in the meeting room and the sinister minister at the various funerals, Heather No. 3 dabbing her forehead from water at the holy fount in the church, and the quarterback's father who says "I love my dead gay son." I remember when this film was released in 1989 and it caused a sensation with the industry cognoscenti in West Hollywood and became an instant cult movie. Whether it is now a classic cult film is questionable.

Certainly Winona Ryder and Christian Slater went on to great careers and it's good to see them here so young and fresh and, especially in Slater's case, uninhibited in his acting and very impressive as such.

Shannen Doherty, as Heather No. 2, was very new on the scene as well and she is probably the funniest of the leads, coming into her own after Heather No. 1 is murdered and Doherty takes over the mantel of the most popular girl at Westerberg High School.

The parents are all portrayed as near idiots which fits the view of most 16 year olds. Every clichéd group of students is on display here. The Heathers and Veronica, the beautiful girls who rule the roost, the nerds (who are very funny), the dumpy and dull girls and the jocks.

The film takes aim at all of these entities and sets out to destroy the popular students and the jocks. Christian Slater, the outsider, has come to town and like Jehovah sets off on a killing spree of Biblical proportions, using the disgruntled Veronica (Ryder) to innocently, at first, help him.

The movie basically is mocking the over-emotionalism of young people, the phony hypocrisy of the teachers and the comatose indifference of parents. It hits bull's eyes in all three of these intentions.

But the whole leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, even with the strangely happy and surreal ending with the change of order coming about as Veronica takes over the mantel of most popular girl and befriends the overweight and friendless Martha, a nice bit of understated comedy played by Carrie Lynn who doesn't speak a single line until the very end, when she gets the last words in the movie.

'Heathers' not as clever as it once seemed and I can't rate it all that high as comedy, and as satire it really is too dark and disturbing to be really funny. It has a bitterness and cynicism that was rather a new thing in teen films at the time, and has spawned a number of copycat movies and TV shows.

But the movie has a strange impact, like a spiked date-rape drink, followed by a corn nut chaser to blow all the poison out of the system. And it certainly lingers in the memory, especially the opening and closing versions of the song 'Che sera sera'.

It's a good solid entertainment for younger adults and older teens but it's not one of the great dark comedies or cult classics that the promoters told us it was when it was released.

Heathers is a memorable movie. I remembered watching Heathers, at a party, during my first year of university. Every one loved Heathers, but I thought heathers was kind of strange/over the top! On second viewing I see the satire, but suicides', and school violence has became more real life and not fiction anymore so Heather.s loses it's humor. Teenage angst about school life, being liked and accepted fuels the movie. The viewer sees popularity is a lot of work, phony, and conniving! In the end of Heathers the message is popularity is just not worth it, as I found out personally. The mother explains social games perfectly fit in with being human and as an adult the games just march on!. Sometimes even worse! Heathers was acted and directed in a off beat way. Heathers well I give 7 stars.

I adore the hell out of Mean Girls but nearly everyone swears up and down this is better, the usual reasoning being that it came first and Mean Girls wouldn't exist without it. Both of those things are true. But it's also true that this film blows chunks.

This is one of the most muddled scripts I've ever seen in an enduringly popular movie. Some of the awful straight-to-video garbage the RLM crew watches on Best of the Worst is more coherent. It would've been so simple to clean up I can only conclude that the people who green-lit these decisions didn't care one bit about the film they were making. I'd like to say they underestimated their audience but this movie's reputation as some kind of campy classic may indicate that they were actually right on the money even if the real money wasn't present at the box office.

The film wants a protagonist unwittingly fooled into becoming a serial killer by her psycho boyfriend BUT SHE'S TALKED INTO THE VERY FIRST MURDER WITH THE LIGHTEST PRODDING AFTER PROVIDING THE FLIMSIEST POSSIBLE PROTEST. "That'll kill her! *shrugs* Oh well, whatever!" She also writes that she wants to do it in her diary before that scene even happens. So later on we're supposed to believe she isn't cold-blooded and is disgusted with the actions of her and especially her boyfriend? Why? She seemed cool with such actions when she agreed to do the very first one on little more than a whim. Unbelievably sloppy writing.

I could write more about the sloppy scripting, the jilting pacing, the stilted performances by every actor, the awkward dialogue, the confused messaging; the pathetic attempts to appeal to teens as REAL people with like FEELINGS, man who don't like being patronized by adults and the MEDIA, who hate the FAKE popular kids, etc. But I'm not wasting another second of my life talking or thinking about this garbage.

Mean Girls is endlessly quotable and legitimately funny. It's a work of art compared to this lowest common denominator slop. People need to take off the nostalgia goggles and see this film for what it is so they can leave it in the past where it belongs.

• "The extreme always seems to make an impression."

^ How very true.

In the post-Columbine, post-grunge rock era of 2016, I'm actually quite certain that a film like this could not be made in today's time. The 1988 black comedy "Heathers" (which was released theatrically one year later in 1989) is by far one of the funniest, most vicious satires ever made. I just turned 31 today, and decided to watch the film again as a birthday treat to myself; I first came across "Heathers" when I was in high school, and I remember thinking at the time that it was one of the strangest teen comedies I had ever come across in my life. It was unlike any teen film I'd seen before it. Back then, I did not fully understand the purpose of satire or possess a full grasp of the meaning behind "black comedy" - but I do now.

In other words, I love satire, and "Heathers" has plenty of it (and much, much more).

"Heathers" came out at the tail-end of the '80s, after nearly a full decade of the likes of the late John Hughes (1950-2009), his imitators, and stupid teen gross-out/sex comedies; Cameron Crowe's "Say Anything..." (1989) would finish out the '80s on a good note. But, put simply, the decade was a wasteland of teen comedies; Hughes obviously made the best - and sappiest - of them all. But between "The Breakfast Club" (1985) and "Say Anything...", there was "Heathers."

"Heathers" has its origins in the mind of its screenwriter, Daniel Waters, a former video-store clerk - much like a certain hip indie director who would gain fame in 1992 and who went by the name of Quentin Tarantino - who had written a massive 200-page screenplay that he wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct. Wishful thinking at its best, perhaps, but the then-26-year-old Waters had caught on to something with his script: it was excessive, it was cynical and subversive, it was outrageous (and sure to generate plenty of controversy upon its theatrical release), it didn't take itself all that seriously, it mocked teen conventions (including the hope and idealism that often drives youth-centered social movements), and it was simply unlike anything else that was out there at the time.

Hollywood usually runs away from scripts like this; "Heathers" is very much the definition of a pitch-black comedy that manages to elicit laughs one moment, and then audience members will be kicking themselves the next for doing so. Much like later teen comedies produced in the '90s and 2000s - like "Clueless" (1995) and "Mean Girls" (2004) - and typically centered around teenage girls, the film, in its own unique hipness, invents its own lingo, culture, and style that was bound to be followed by its many like-minded imitators over the next two decades.

Directed by Micheal Lehmann in his directorial debut, "Heathers" centers around a clique of four very wealthy, very popular high school girls at the fictional Westerburg High School in Sherwood, Ohio; all are named Heather - their cruel, vicious leader/"queen bee" Heather Chandler (Kim Walker); the stylish but weak-willed cheerleader Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk); and the bookish follower Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty). There is a fourth "Heather," except that her name is actually Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder, also the story's narrator). Veronica was somehow plucked from relative obscurity and joined their ranks, and she loathes every minute of it. Sick of her "best friend" Heather Chandler's cruelty to their classmates, she's looking for a way out and fortunately - or unfortunately? - she finds her savior in the newly transplanted, self-styled rebel-with-a-cause Jason "J. D." Dean (the always-cocky Christian Slater, whose character's name is quite possibly a reference to fallen Hollywood icon James Dean, or the late author J. D. Salinger).

From there, Veronica and J. D. carry on something resembling a fling, but get way in over their heads when a prank they play on Heather Chandler goes terribly awry and results in her death - thereby turning her into a martyr of sorts - and J. D. conspires to up the ante by launching his own personal crusade against the school's popular elites. Veronica, meanwhile, has to find a way to stop him before it's too late.

If Molly Ringwald was the "teen queen" of the '80s, then Winona Ryder represented the darker underbelly of teen angst; I remember the first time I saw her in "Beetlejuice" (1988) and she probably became my first celebrity crush. I loved her character here and the growing realization of just how far her actions have gone as she also begins to realize how sick and deranged J. D. truly is, and her desperate attempts to try to stop him. I also loved Slater's portrayal of J. D., a self-styled outsider who also hides a dark sociopathy and would arguably become the archetype for troubled teenage outsiders and loners everywhere in the '90s and early 21st century.

"Heathers" is a film that satirizes - viciously so - teen suicide, murder, bullying, cliques, and youth-centered/-driven social activism; but while it treats its subject matter with (dark) humor, it does so with a certain degree of maturity and morality - maybe even a detached sensitivity - that can be very easy to miss by some people. Regardless, in the post-Columbine world of 2016, a film like this simply could not be made in today's time, because it would be considered to be in "bad taste." But "Heathers" is a movie that was made for teenagers. In the words of producer Denise Di Novi, "(Teenagers) see in it what they hate about high school - the tyranny of social groups... They get very clearly that these are their dark fantasies." And that's what "Heathers" is, a black comedy/high school satire that plays out as the perfect realization of their darkest fantasies about the high school experience.

^ In that regard, The Extreme Always Does Seem To Make An Impression.

9/10.

Great black comedy/satire about suicide and teenage life. Director Michael Lehmann knew exactly what he was doing and has delivered an hilarious film that hits home again and again with its observations of life at high school. It is deliciously dark, and marvelously sends up young teens trying to be cool and popular.

Winona Ryder is superbly sexy and very funny, but Christian Slater steals the show with his wicked portrayal of a cynical teen who has no time for plastic people, or anybody for that matter. His acting talents in this film parallel the best of Jack Nicholson's darkest roles. Superb entertainment.

Friday, May 10, 1991 - Knox District Centre

Marvellously written, deliciously acted and superbly directed is "Heathers", a wonderful black comedy about High School, popularity, teenage suicide and every other issue that may crop up amongst the young.

Christian Slater is amazingly malevolent as "J.D.", a newcomer to Westerberg who joins forces with Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) to get rid of the 'cool' people who make so many students' lives miserable. Michael Lehmann's sharp direction is a treat in a movie which hilariously sends up teens with its accurate dialogue and dead on depiction of their way of life. Loses a little momentum toward the end, but still a great film.

Sunday, January 9, 1994 - Video

There is hardly a doubt in my mind that Heathers is one of the best films of the 1980s, if not included in a list that names all the essential films of movidedom. The movie is about Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) who is fed up with her role and association with the cruelest and most popular clique in Remington High. The three other members (appropriatley named Heather and identified by their last names 'Duke', hobbies 'Cheerleader', and position '#1') are the dominant members of the school and take pride and joy in other's suffering. It isn't until Veronica meets a loner named Jason Dean (Christian Slater) that she finally has an outlet to vent her frustration about her life. Eventually JD and Veronica murder the leader of the clique and are forced to cover it up with a suicide. This leads to a horrificly dark satire of the teenage suicide epidemic of the eighties. After JD's rage continues Veronica must ask herself the question: Is she on the way to the prom or to hell? The movie is brilliant acted by Ryder, but the show is stolen by Slater. His Nicholson-esque performance is eerie and he gets my vote as one of the top villains of all time. The supporting roles are done well enough with the standouts being Dean's creepy father and Paula Fleming, the guidance counselour. Lehman directs the movie with a brilliant mix of colors that range from lighter at the beginning of the movie to darker at the end, as the tone changes. Although both Lehman and Waters would never match their previous success (they were actually quite bad after Heathers) this film proves that they did at one time have something to offer the world of cinema. While the story may seem like an ordinary black comedy and satire of the 1980s teen films it has a very simple message underneath: Be your own person. We have always been told in our lives to "not do something just because it's cool". So many teens reflect that, but there is also the other side of the coin "don't do something just because it's uncool" which Veronica tries with JD. So many teens conform to unconformity which doesn't make them individuals at all, this was really the first film to satire that other side of the argument. Be your own person does not mean rebel against the popular people or to join them, it just means be yourself and I think by the end of the film the viewer shares with Veronica's journey.