I really thought I’d be able to pull a really thorough and all-inclusive long review of this movie this viewing, but I really don’t know where to begin. I’m thinking it may be about 15 years since I first saw it, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t influence pretty much my entire outlook on life through my teenage years. It’s a classic.

Watching it now, it hasn’t aged a second. I notice how brilliant the dialogue is even more – not just the ever-quoted lines, like “F**k me gently with a chainsaw, do I look like Mother Theresa?” “What is your damage, Heather?” etc, simply every line. This screenplay predated Tarantino’s work by years. Daniel Waters invented an entire language, and all these great words are delivered by the perfect cast. So Christian Slater is channeling Jack Nicholson – JD would too!

I love the whole atmosphere of the movie. It’s kind of surreal all the way – the cafeteria of the opening scene, the whole school in fact, has this dreamy, almost misty quality. David Newman’s weird synthy score is perfect, even covering for party music (I guess they were trying to save money) in the big Remington party scene.

Mean Girls recently emulated a lot of the bitchy style of this movie really, really well, but nothing will ever compare to Heathers. In the “Swatch Dogs and Diet Coke Heads” documentary on the DVD, Daniel Waters talks about how he envisaged Heathers as the movie Kubrick would make if he made a movie in the highschool genre (ie. The Perfect Movie of its Genre à la sci-fi 2001, war Full Metal Jacket, period Barry Lyndon). It sounds like an insane vision, but the miracle is that looking back now, that really is what it became. It’s not just a cult classic – nearly 20 years later, I think it’s definitely earned the right to drop the word “cult”.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 12th, 2005 at 4:40 pm in Movie Reviews, unrated. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.