Heathers

Heathers is a teen comedy as if made by David Lynch. The surrealistic tone is set in the opening credits when we see a croquet match, shot in dizzying day-glo colours, that has a human head for its peg. It's a weirdness that permeates the film reaching its zenith in JD's bizarre relationship with his demolitions man father, who refers to his son as dad and vice versa and appears to have at some point blown up his mother.

One of the movie's comedic highlights is Miss Fleming (Penelope Milford), a hippie dippy teacher for whom the mounting student body count is manna from heaven as she organises communal outpourings of faux grief and passes the suicide notes around class ('Are we going to be tested on this?' one teen wonders). 'Before a teenager decides to kill himself, there are a few things he needs to know. After all, this is a decision that effects all of us. And there's only one chance to get it right,' she solemnly pronounces.

In fact, it's this gleeful recognition of adult insincerity that gives the film its giddily vicious power. Fathers of school jocks set up to die as if they were involved in a homosexual suicide pact wail, 'I love my dead gay son' over the coffin prompting JD's sour remark: 'How do you think he'd react to a son that had a limp wrist with a pulse?' Principals announce that they'd 'be willing to go half a day for a cheerleader' when deciding on an appropriate period of mourning for yet another apparent suicide.

While Winona is perfectly serviceable as Veronica, the engine of the film is Slater, whose patented hormonal Jack Nicholson routine elevated him briefly to the ranks of the effortlessly cool.

Tragically Heathers loses the courage of its nasty convictions in the last half hour of the film and begins to pull its punches. Any movie that promises an exploding school and a Jim Jones style mass suicide should really deliver, and the denouement in which only Slater blows himself up can't help but feel like a disappointment. Still, for the most part Heathers is as bitter and dangerous as a cup full of liquid Draino.