Better Off Dead

1985 teen angst comedy

Rating: 11/20 (Jen: 7/20)

Plot: Poor Lane Meyer. His girlfriend Beth has dumped him for his skiing rival. He's left with one choice--to kill himself. Unfortunately for him, he's not very good at it. Unfortunately for us, it's not very funny. Things start turning around for him when he meets a French exchange student and gets a chance to race against his rival.

There's a lot of quirkiness here. There are crazy paperboys, Asian drag racers, stop-animated hamburgers. Although these bits actually might make the movie more entertaining, they also distract, almost as if they were thrown into the movie so that the audience won't notice how bad it is. This is definitely stuck in the mid-80's. A few clever ideas (the failed suicide attempts not really being one of them) don't add up to much here, probably because they have to peak their heads out from underneath a predictable, cliched story and predictable, cliched characters. I don't know why I watched this. I was going to give this a bonus point because Curtis "Booger" Armstrong was in it, but I had already deducted a point during the opening credits because the director's name is Savage Steve Holland. Then, I looked up Savage Steve Holland and noticed that his breakthrough was animating the Whammy on the game show Press Your Luck and gave the bonus point right back.