Plot: What’s it about?
When I first saw “Heathers” about ten years ago, I loved it. This is the first movie that I classified as a “Dark Comedy” in the sense that it has a great deal of humor, but has violence or killing in a serious sense. Now, every other movie is a “Dark Comedy”…
Heathers is the story of a high school clique composed of, you guessed it, three girls all named Heather. Veronica (Winona Ryder) is the “outsider” trying desperately to fit into the Heathers (maybe changing her name would help). The Heathers are in total control of the social aspect of the school. They go around giving lunchtime polls that are absolutely pointless and other varied things.
Enter J.D. (Christian Slater), the new kid in school who is unlike anything that this rural Ohio school has ever seen. J.D. has jet black hair, wears a trenchcoat and carries a gun to school (I guess this is common now, but not back then). It doesn’t take J.D. and Vernoica long to start seeing each other and everything seems great. Oh, well there’s a murder, that kind of ruins the “great” aspect…The lead “Heather” is accidentally killed by Veronica and J.D. when they switch a homemade hangover cure with a bottle of Drano (actually “Hull Clean”, but you probably already knew that). This, of course, devastates the school and the problem with the Heathers is worse than before.
All of this eventually spirals down into J.D. going too far and wanting to blow up the whole school as a symbol of “Youth rebellion”. He wants to be remembered…
Heathers is one of the better and clever movies around. It was a critical success and certainly one to see!
Video: How does it look?
The letterboxed image is a lot clearer than the old laserdisc and I even owned the letterboxed VHS copy as well. I think that this could certainly benefit from 16:9 enhancement (all titles could), but the colors are very vivid and the image is overall, a good one.
Audio: How does it sound?
The 2.0 Dolby Digital Soundtrack is good. This being a movie driven by plot and dialogue, a full 5.1 mix wasn’t really needed. The dialogue is clean and has no distortion and front surround speakers are used with a fairly good soundtrack.
Supplements: What are the extras?
A theatrical trailer and a behind the scenes featurette, which just started playing into the movie I didn’t really understand…The featurette is nice and has interviews with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater from when the movie came out (they were so young).
