‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ is Still Alive After Over 30 Years

20th Century Fox

The guy’s been dead for over thirty years but he lives on inside all of us. I’m talking about Bernie. I mean, he was a total dick in life, but when he died we fell in love with him.

It’s been thirty years since the release of Weekend at Bernie’s. A lot of people reading this won’t even notice this. You probably saw it in a college dorm room or on a Netflix and chill night, and you were stoned or drunk, and you thought that it was either stupid as hell or the funniest shit you’d ever seen. Who makes a movie about a dude who’s dead? For the entire movie?

Can you picture the pitch room? I imagine Robert Klane walking in with a kind of swagger nobody would ever dare walk in with. Producers staring him down wondering how this schmuck is going to waste their time. Maybe they thought, “Well, this guy wrote some episodes of M*A*S*H. He’s got a short list of oddball screenplays with mild success. He writes with a sort of celebration of morbidity. Let’s hear what he has to say.” They’re all sitting in silence, and I picture some Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fat cat looking bored, smoking a cigar for effect. Maybe he’s in a slightly good mood because he’s recently divorced and his lawyer managed to retain most of his gross fortune. “Okay, what’ve you got?”

“Picture this. Our star is a real asshole. Everybody hates him. That is everybody at work. But he’s embezzling money from his company. In his home life out in the Hamptons everybody loves him. But he’s surrounded by leaches who are also stupid rich. They live a ridiculously lavish lifestyle, and they’re all drunks. They do business under the influence, and they party all weekend, every weekend. His floating party friends pretend to like him because he has as much or more money than they do, and they let him use his house to party. They use his boat, and they want his car,” Robert Klane probably said. He pauses, and waits for a reaction before going on.

“So, The Great Gatsby?” one of the MGM executives asks, snickering. “YES!” Robert Klane exclaims. “But he’s dead for the entire movie!”

The room is quiet.

Robert Klane sees the confusion, and he realizes he forgot to mention the kicker. The kicker isn’t that he’s dead. The kicker is, “It’s a comedy!”

The whole room of uptight suits laughs at him. Luckily for Klane he had an afternoon appointment, and it was a three martini lunch for most of the executives. “Death is pretty funny,” one of them says. Can we work in Andrew McCarthy? He’s connecting with the kids these days. “Absolutely,” says Klane. “We’ll pair him with Jonathan Silverman, and we’ll have gold,” another executive says. “So, who’s our dead guy?”

And there it is. The genius of Robert Klane’s outlandishly stupid yet astonishingly funny writing is complimented by Three’s Company jerk face and The Love Boat’s pompous asshole, Terry Kiser. He’s a brilliant actor with the skills of a veteran physical comedian. He’ll play dead like no one else. And. He. Did. If you ask ANYONE who their favorite dead guy in any movie is, the answer, 98% of the time, comes back: Bernie Lomax. Some pretentious dick wad will say Hamlet, and some other upstart will say Joe Black. Everyone who wants to say Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Frankenstein’s god damned monster is STILL going to say Bernie Lomax. Because Bernie freakin’ Lomax, man. He owns dead characters. It’s practically unanimous.

Weekend at Bernie’s allows us to poke fun at death. We get to be morbid while we’re in a good mood. We get to look at the Grim Reaper, and say, “Party on, dude!” In Weekend at Bernie’s we are treated to escalating humor that gets more and more absurd as the movie progresses. With half-baked sitcom logic we can “pretend he didn’t die… just for a bit,” as Andrew McCarthy’s Larry Wilson reasons.

Bernie is killed by his business and crime partners who are just as cliched and over the top as he is. He’s killed because he’s “getting sloppy,” but his boss, Vito, has personal reasons too. Bernie is sleeping with his woman, Tina. “Over a woman!” the echoes of Jack Nicholson’s Joker reverberate. Only Bernie doesn’t survive a certain death and kill his boss in revenge. Instead “his woman,” played by Catherine Perks, who deserves accolades for her exaggerated Jersey girl impersonation, comes around looking for Bernie when she thinks his absence is about him ignoring her. She lays the stiff while he’s upstairs, and we should be appalled. Instead, we are covering our mouths and laughing our asses off. A dead guy gets more action than Larry Wilson (Andrew McCarthy) does.

The only problem is Weekend at Bernie’s doesn’t run the gamut of dead guy jokes. There’s actually too much other comedy happening as Bernie’s body goes through dying over and over. We’re laughing along, but we’re left mourning what could have been. So much is untapped. How did we laugh through this when so much was left unsaid? So many dead guy jokes just never came. The epilogue serves as what nowadays would be a post credits scene. Bernie’s gurney rolls down the boardwalk, and he tumbles out, landing behind the puppeteers. Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy propped up the star the whole time, so they deserve some credit too. Bernie’s Back. Fade to Black. I turn to my wife, “There should have been a sequel. Wait, was there a sequel?” We furiously check though the sources, and find it for sale on Amazon Prime. SOLD! It’s a double feature!

TriStar Pictures

The opening credits on Weekend at Bernie’s 2 had us in a second. I absolutely love stylized animated sequence openings. They brought us up to speed on Bernie’s situation. He’s finally in the morgue after some more hijinks. The story begins right where the last one left off, and we get to follow Larry and Richard through another adventure with a dead guy. This time Terry Kiser gets to show off his physical comedy skills because he’s half-ass resurrected by a couple of new characters who bring a different version of Laurel and Hardy to the table. Tom Wright and Steve James as Charles and Henry inadequately voodoo Bernie back from the dead in a bathroom stall. The short of it is Bernie is reanimated, but he only “comes to life” when calypso music is playing. This preposterous premise is enough to make you turn it off, but you can’t! Terry Kiser’s butt won’t let you. I was laughing my ass off watching him move. The physical comedy only gets better in the second one.

I have to wonder how Bernie never became a trilogy. He’s still out and about at the end of part 2, so get on it Hollywood. Mr. Klane, let me tell you you ARE a genius. I noticed Andrew McCarthy’s line, “Am I a genius or what?” when he hooked Bernie up to the carriage to replace the lost horse. He’s pulls the carriage like he’s at the front of a conga line. Yes, Robert, you are a genius. I’m so glad you had an opportunity to make fun of the dead guy with those jokes you probably edited out of the first one. Yes, I noticed when Henry and Charles were looking for the chicken in the porn theater. They found a guy with a rooster in his lap. You didn’t even have to say it. I laughed, and no one else knew why. Yes, I noticed the call back to the first movie when Arthur Hummel blinds himself with the flash. That was Richard Parker blinding himself in the part one when he carelessly looks directly into the spotlight inside the lighthouse. You wrote so much that could have been missed. I saw it. I saw the Steve Martin “Wild and Crazy Guy” reference when you harpooned Bernie through the side of his head. You, sir, made a dead guy funny.


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