Better Off Dead (1985 film)

Plot

In the fictional Northern California town of Greendale, high school student Lane Meyer's main interests are skiing and his girlfriend of six months, Beth Truss. Shortly before Christmas, Beth dumps him for the handsome and popular captain of the ski team, Roy Stalin. Roy is an arrogant bully who unfairly rejects Lane at ski team tryouts. Beth also criticizes Lane's car, an old station wagon, though he also owns a 1967 Camaro that sits dilapidated in the driveway.

Lane lives with his ditzy mother Jenny, who concocts creepy family meals; his genius little brother Badger, who at age almost 8 builds powerful lasers and attracts trashy women; and his lawyer father Al, who tries to stop the menacing paperboy Johnny from breaking garage door windows with thrown newspapers. Johnny claims the Meyers owe him two dollars and persistently hounds Lane. Lane also encounters two Japanese drag racers, one speaking only Japanese and the other having learned English from Howard Cosell.

Unable to move past Beth's rejection, Lane makes several half-hearted suicide attempts that comically fail. With help from his best friend Charles de Mar, who inhales everyday substances like Jell-O and nitrous oxide, Lane tries to ski the K-12 peak to win Beth back but wipes out. He gets fired from his job at Pig Burgers in front of Roy and Beth, and suffers neurotic hallucinations. He gradually gets to know a French exchange student, Monique Junot, who has a crush on him, while she stays with overbearing neighbor Mrs. Smith.

Production

Parts of the film were shot in Alta, Brighton, and Snowbird, Utah. The Meyers' home is at 1636 Virginia Avenue in Glendale, California, across from the Smith family home at 1633 Virginia. Lane's high school is Hollywood High School in Los Angeles. The exterior of the school dance sequence was shot at Anderson W. Clark Magnet High School in La Crescenta, California. The street where Lane is challenged by Japanese drag racers is near the foothills of Monrovia, California, with other driving scenes shot in Duarte and Sierra Madre. Hand-drawn animation was done by Savage Steve Holland's collaborator Bill Kopp, who later worked on One Crazy Summer and Eek! The Cat. A dream sequence with hamburgers and fries was produced in stop motion. Actor Yano Anaya, who played a paperboy gang member, also looped all of Demian Slade's dialogue as Johnny the paperboy.

Reception

Better Off Dead was one of the few films critics Siskel & Ebert featured on their television show At the Movies while bypassing in their Chicago newspapers; they gave it two thumbs down. Bill Cosford of The Miami Herald wrote that the film has the body of a tired teen comedy but the soul of an inspired student film, interrupting itself with flights of animated fancy. According to Holland, John Cusack did not like the film and walked out of a screening during filming of One Crazy Summer, telling Holland it was the worst thing he had ever seen and that he would never trust him as a director again.

Holland said Cusack's comments made him not care about movies anymore. In a 2013 Reddit AMA, Cusack said he did not hate filming it but thought it could have been better, adding that he has nothing against the film and is glad people still love it. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 75% approval rating based on 28 reviews, with a critical consensus noting its anarchic mix of black humor and surreal comedy anchored by Cusack's performance. On Metacritic, it received a score of 51 based on 7 reviews, indicating mixed or average reviews.

Soundtrack

Rupert Hine was the main producer behind the soundtrack for this film. The first song, "With One Look (The Wildest Dream)," was produced by Hine and included Cy Curnin and Jamie West-Oram from the Fixx, with Hine also singing. Hine handled "Arrested by You," "Better Off Dub (Title Music)," and "Race the K-12 (Instrumental)" entirely on his own; Dusty Springfield later recorded a version of "Arrested by You" for her 1990 album. Terri Nunn, from Berlin, sang lead on "Dancing in Isolation," and Hine was considered to produce an album for Berlin. "Come to Your Rescue" came from Thinkman, a band Hine created to quietly revive his solo career. West-Oram also played guitar on that track and on "The Falcon Beat." Only two songs, "A Little Luck" and "One Way Love (Better Off Dead)," did not involve Hine; E.G. Daily sang both and performed them in the film's dance scene.