I've been revisiting some of my childhood movies in this blog, here and there dropping one in whenever I get the feeling to rewatch one of them.
Heathers is one of the few movies I specifically associate with Idaho, where I live now. The other movies are Scream, The Pink Panther animated series, and Raise the Red Lantern. Heathers is the strongest though, as I remember my sister and I watching this so much that once my grandma or grandpa got angry and turned it off, saying we'd watched it too many times.
Heathers is an extremely dark comedy, a high school fantasy of the darkest sort. Winona Ryder is Veronica, a clinger on to a clique of three popular girls all named Heather. Veronica is interested in Christian Slater as JD, a punky outsider who gets introduced by pulling a gun on two jocks and shooting blanks at them. they immediately get busy after meeting, and his true delusional, homicidal, psychotic side begins to show. After one of the popular Heathers dies at the hands of JD, the two plucky students write a suicide note and it hits and effects the school.
Heathers is a strange rewatch in a post-Columbine, post-spree shootings world. It depicts in perfect clarity multiple fantasies about killing fellow students, from JD's introduction all the way to killing the popular kids by people dressed in black and trench-coats. I could see many people pointing to this as a "inspiration" to those students. In the end, JD wears a oversize black trench coat and has a bomb- I mean, how predictive was that?
They say this is a comedy, but I didn't notice anything that was supposed to be funny. It's a dark ass movie and it's a savage rewatch, certainly prescient and way ahead of it's time. I could see this getting into lists of banned films, if we ever go that route again. I didn't remember most of it, but it's really entertaining and crazy.
Heathers has aged well, and it's insane that it exists. I give it 4 stars.
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