Weekend At Bernie’s

Weekend At Bernie’s

Sometimes a movie can have what is widely known as being a “one joke premise”, which is basically a single idea that a comedy can be sold on and then have marketed like mad hell all over the place just to see if a paying audience bites, and then not only is that “one joke” actually realized to the absolute fullest potential, but the film itself DOES find an audience, becoming a success and maintaining a major cult following to this day. That is what applies to this 1989 release, put in the hands of a competent yet journeyman director like Ted Kotcheff (who at least puts in a hilarious cameo for himself as well) and asking the basic question, what if two lower level office drones were set up to be killed by their boss, but then if the boss was killed instead before they arrived, the two drones decided that the only way that they can survive long enough to figure everything out is to just pretend that their now dead boss is actually STILL alive, and must now do everything in their power to maintain that very illusion?? It’s certainly a dark, tasteless, and even borderline sick premise for a PG-13 comedy, and yet Kotcheff manages to make it work by utilizing two key elements: One, the idea that the boss (Bernie), whilst still a shady weasel when he was alive, lived life so much to the fullest as a ladies man and fun loving rich guy that even being literally dead still doesn’t stop him from being the life of the party. And two, using those elements of Bernie’s carefree, freewheeling yuppie lifestyle to satirically portray the other practitioners of said lifestyle as being so completely out of touch with reality that they don’t even realize that their compadre Bernie is really and truly dead even while they are in his very presence, going so far as to carrying on whole conversations with him and taking his non responses as just being Bernie’s way of always playing it cool and in the process exposing their own clueless tendencies as well. As our ostensible “stars” here, we get Andrew McCarthy (former second string member of the 80s Brat Pack) and Jonathan Silverman (once thought of as being a top notch young stage actor before sliding into obscurity on the basis of his acute lack of onscreen charisma), and their ongoing schtick seems to be having them as best friends even though Silverman is an upright young citizen and McCarthy is just a goofball, irrelevant slacker type, the kind of guy who could be wildly dancing at a party packed with people but yet still nobody would even pay any attention to him. As the film’s opening minutes work it into overtime to try and establish the chemistry and rapport between these two (and manages to actually elicit a few smiles), the actual plot really gets going proper when while checking on some paperwork at the insurance firm that they work at, they find possible evidence of the company being defrauded out of 2 million dollars and thus bring it to the attention of their boss, Bernie. Turns out Bernie actually IS the guy who stole the money and in order to cover his own now exposed ass, turns to his mob connections to arrange for a hit on the pair after facetiously telling McCarthy and Silverman just what a great job they’ve been doing and inviting them out to his beach house in The Hamptons (actually Wrightsville Beach, NC) for Labor Day weekend. But the tables are turned when the mob boss (whose girlfriend has been screwing Bernie) gives the order for Bernie to be killed instead, and when McCarthy and Silverman arrive at his beach house, they discover the awful truth as well and decide to do everything they can to cover it up. And so it goes on, with the funniest sequence being the “roving party” that shows up almost as soon as the heroes figure out that Bernie is dead, and despite the fact that ol Bernie was a real bastard in so many ways, it is clear that he was obviously VERY popular (and much loved) by these rich island denizens for whom it can be implied that they themselves just don’t WANT to acknowledge that something is very wrong with Bernie and pretty much carry on with their usual business (as McCarthy and Silverman look on in shock) all while being accurately portrayed for what they are, filthy rich, dishonest, shallow 80s yuppie archetypes with not a care in the world for what’s happening outside of their own private comfort zones and banal areas of interest who all also seem to have just a little bit too much free time on their hands as well. And the story goes on like that (successfully, I might add) with more inspired dynamics like having Bernie’s mob girlfriend (Catherine Parks) barging in and pushing her way right past the passive heroes so that she can see Bernie, only to come back downstairs like she just had the best sex of her life (did she really?), the heroes using literal puppetry techniques in order to make Bernie be able to do things like wave at people and walk around, and the hit man who was ordered to kill Bernie originally (Don Calfa) having an ongoing nervous breakdown as it appears more and more to him that Bernie is somehow still alive and thus continuously trying to finish the job (even though he had succeeded on his first try)! Through it all, even though McCarthy and Silverman are supposed to be the ones starring in the film, they constantly find themselves being outshined (if not having the whole movie stolen outright from them) by Terry Kiser as Bernie Lomax himself, a classic cinematic comic character whose brilliance is in his simplicity, whose existential appeal is in the fact that he doesn’t actually exist anymore, and as played by Kiser (a longtime veteran character actor who has been in so many other movies that one might be surprised at not remembering having seen him in anything else), the character of Bernie and his plight have contributed more than anything to the everlasting cult appeal of the film itself, absorbing amazing amounts of physical punishment (which doesn’t bother him since he’s dead), almost always finding himself in the right place at the right time as the plot dictates, and yet always still managing to be the center of attention no matter where he is at, even when his two co stars are on either side of him (they really could have cast almost any two guys in those parts) as Kiser really does bring the most subtle touches (including facial expressions and body language) to basically playing limp, so much so that it’s hard not to wonder if he’s ever had legitimate mime training. Kiser’s “performance” as the dead Bernie is really so commanding in so many ways that it actually hurts the token romantic subplot of the film featuring Silverman trying to woo the hot young intern from the firm (Catherine Mary Stewart) whose family also happens to be staying at the same location, as it seems that the film only goes off on this tangent so extensively because Stewart was certainly a major actress at the time and they wanted her role to be substantial as well, but it still distracts the viewer away from whatever Bernie is doing at that particular moment, making the whole relationship itself seem rather trivial, as Silverman comes off as being much better suited to be carrying on his schtick with McCarthy, with the latter jokingly coming across as being the more amoral of the two who always finds new ways to exploit poor Bernie while also always waving off Silverman’s constant pleas to just do the right thing and finally call the cops. But in the end, it’s still that weird yet magical concept of being the dead man who still lives life much more to the hilt than most of us mere mortals ever do that drives the engine underneath this crazed but somewhat misunderstood cult classic, one that was so popular that the funniest moment was yet to come at just the very notion of starting production on an actual sequel that would continue with its title character’s ongoing adventures despite him still being dead, but yep they actually really did make a Weekend At Bernie’s 2…

9/10

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