Medium: Movie
Runtime: 1hr, 41 Minutes
Genre: Comedy
Rating: PG-13
Back in the saddle again!
So to kick off the resurrection of The Digger, we'll be taking a look at a movie I remember liking from my (exceptionally young) youth. As promised, here's:
The film starts off in the summer; straight-laced Rich (left) and slacker Larry (right) are two corporate cogs who find themselves having to come into work on not only one of the most blazingly hot days, but also a weekend when nobody else is working, to finish migrating their (unnamed) company's computers to a new system. This allows them the opportunity to catch foul play in the records- someone is siphoning off money from the company, and has already embezzled up to 2 million dollars at least. The next day, they bring this to the attention of their boss, Bernie Lomax, who agrees that something is afoot and invites them to his beach house on Hampton Island to take a closer look at the numbers over Labor Day weekend.
Rich and Larry show up that weekend to the beach house, marvel at the sort of high luxury only a corporate bigwig gets to enjoy, and finally stumble into Bernie's study, where they find that their favorite boss has passed out cold. Except not, because as they soon discover, Lomax is no more- he's ceased to be. Initially they plan to call the cops to report the body, but a wild party rolls into Bernie's sweet pad, as all the neighbors invite themselves in and not a single one of them notices that the host of the festivities has gone to join the choir invisible. They're all too wrapped up in the extravagant booze, beautiful women, and themselves to look too closely at Bernie, and while Larry is perfectly content to let the rich partygoers keep on thinking nothing's wrong and enjoy living in the lap of luxury for the night, Rich finds himself distracted with a pretty young intern to the company that he's fallen for, and things start getting more and more away from them until they're forced to keep up the charade that their former employer is still alive- up to and including using strings to make him wave at passersby and walking his corpse around in plain sight.
If you haven't gathered by now, Weekend at Bernie's takes the line and, not simply content with crossing it, picks it up and uses it as a jump-rope. Which, I'm not exactly opposed to; in fact, the 'voodoo dancing corpse' in the sequel* was something of a running joke in the family for a while. The problem is that....
......well, 'problem' should be plural. The pacing feels slow and awkward and the story takes a while to get anywhere worthwhile, the romantic subplot seems to exist only when the movie needs an excuse to get Rich to forget about calling the police and/or to facilitate shenanigans, and the climax lacks any sort of punch whatsoever- instead of a hilarious rapid-firing of Chekhov's Guns, we instead get a jumbled mess of disconnected events with a crotch joke thrown in for good measure. That's not me imposing my expectations on the writers, that's... it legitimately feels like they were trying to do the former, and wound up with the latter. The antagonists are such a non-presence that for more than half the movie, there is no real conflict aside from Rich putting up with Larry's increasingly audacious antics. Many of the sideplots are introduced just to introduce new complications to the boys or set up jokes, but most of them are never addressed in full.
Which isn't to say that it's a bad movie. There were a few moments where I laughed out loud, especially in terms of sight gags, and even with as hard of a time as I have sitting through full movies these days I managed to finish it in one go (with a slight break in the middle to grab a drink and attend to a quick chore). It's not without charm.
It just doesn't hold up as well as I half-remembered.
To be very fair, I was a very little kid when I first watched them.
TL;DR: A comedy with a dark sense of humor, Weekend at Bernie's is worth watching at least once for making Of Corpse He's Alive a popular joke. But, it's not the greatest piece of cinema ever produced, and has a lot of obvious flaws.
Virtues: Actually pretty funny at times, likeable leads.
Sins: Badly told story, lots of things felt 'thrown in'.
Score: 6/10
Final Verdict: So Okay It's Meh
I can see why this movie became popular, even if I only caught the tail end of the era that produced it. However, I think that this one goes in the trade-in pile. I don't hate it, but walking away from an experience feeling completely indifferent to it, is generally a bad sign.
*Yes, there's a sequel. Yes, it features a voodoo-possessed Bernie getting up and dancing. Pigeon is just no substitute for a good old sacrificial chicken.
Runtime: 1hr, 41 Minutes
Genre: Comedy
Rating: PG-13
Back in the saddle again!
So to kick off the resurrection of The Digger, we'll be taking a look at a movie I remember liking from my (exceptionally young) youth. As promised, here's:
Rich and Larry show up that weekend to the beach house, marvel at the sort of high luxury only a corporate bigwig gets to enjoy, and finally stumble into Bernie's study, where they find that their favorite boss has passed out cold. Except not, because as they soon discover, Lomax is no more- he's ceased to be. Initially they plan to call the cops to report the body, but a wild party rolls into Bernie's sweet pad, as all the neighbors invite themselves in and not a single one of them notices that the host of the festivities has gone to join the choir invisible. They're all too wrapped up in the extravagant booze, beautiful women, and themselves to look too closely at Bernie, and while Larry is perfectly content to let the rich partygoers keep on thinking nothing's wrong and enjoy living in the lap of luxury for the night, Rich finds himself distracted with a pretty young intern to the company that he's fallen for, and things start getting more and more away from them until they're forced to keep up the charade that their former employer is still alive- up to and including using strings to make him wave at passersby and walking his corpse around in plain sight.
If you haven't gathered by now, Weekend at Bernie's takes the line and, not simply content with crossing it, picks it up and uses it as a jump-rope. Which, I'm not exactly opposed to; in fact, the 'voodoo dancing corpse' in the sequel* was something of a running joke in the family for a while. The problem is that....
......well, 'problem' should be plural. The pacing feels slow and awkward and the story takes a while to get anywhere worthwhile, the romantic subplot seems to exist only when the movie needs an excuse to get Rich to forget about calling the police and/or to facilitate shenanigans, and the climax lacks any sort of punch whatsoever- instead of a hilarious rapid-firing of Chekhov's Guns, we instead get a jumbled mess of disconnected events with a crotch joke thrown in for good measure. That's not me imposing my expectations on the writers, that's... it legitimately feels like they were trying to do the former, and wound up with the latter. The antagonists are such a non-presence that for more than half the movie, there is no real conflict aside from Rich putting up with Larry's increasingly audacious antics. Many of the sideplots are introduced just to introduce new complications to the boys or set up jokes, but most of them are never addressed in full.
Which isn't to say that it's a bad movie. There were a few moments where I laughed out loud, especially in terms of sight gags, and even with as hard of a time as I have sitting through full movies these days I managed to finish it in one go (with a slight break in the middle to grab a drink and attend to a quick chore). It's not without charm.
It just doesn't hold up as well as I half-remembered.
To be very fair, I was a very little kid when I first watched them.
TL;DR: A comedy with a dark sense of humor, Weekend at Bernie's is worth watching at least once for making Of Corpse He's Alive a popular joke. But, it's not the greatest piece of cinema ever produced, and has a lot of obvious flaws.
Virtues: Actually pretty funny at times, likeable leads.
Sins: Badly told story, lots of things felt 'thrown in'.
Score: 6/10
Final Verdict: So Okay It's Meh
I can see why this movie became popular, even if I only caught the tail end of the era that produced it. However, I think that this one goes in the trade-in pile. I don't hate it, but walking away from an experience feeling completely indifferent to it, is generally a bad sign.
*Yes, there's a sequel. Yes, it features a voodoo-possessed Bernie getting up and dancing. Pigeon is just no substitute for a good old sacrificial chicken.
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