Strong and Moving!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Hands down, one of the most unusual movies I've seen a long time, "Heathers" feels like a snarky response to the '80s teen movie. And it works pretty well on that level, but even better as a black comedy. It leaves no one out of its cross hairs, from the school faculty and the dumb jocks to - hell, even the state of Ohio. Everyone's an idiot. Or a sociopath.I didn't know what to expect with this movie, but it's sharp, surreal, and very funny. Not to mention Winona Ryder at her cutest.Wickedly entertaining.7/10

Heathers had a really, really well-timed appearance in my life. It came out when I was halfway through my first year of junior high at the end of the 1980s, and feeling utterly bewildered by these outlandish creatures around me: the eighties trendsetters. Their alien styles and feral egotism was captured perfectly in Heathers, depicting the way high school seems when seen through the eyes of a meek, unpretentious beginner. Veronica Sawyer (played by Ryder) is a girl like you, me and pretty much anyone that was ever a junior student, desperate to fit in. But not THAT desperate!The garish style of the characters in Heathers was never meant to be realistic... a fact that seems to have been lost on almost all viewers that were born after 1985. It was a brutal and massive send-up of everything that was hateful about the 1980s - and there was loads! But despite all the exaggeration, Heathers served up a very accurate reflection of way that the secondary school environment really seemed to my dazed, adolescent eyes. And yet shoulder pads were never *that* big, hippies were never THAT f*cked up in class and the bad boy never carried a gun (this was back in the days before the real high school shootings began). We all knew that Heathers wasn't meant to be realistic, at least not on a factual level. It was meant to be realistic on an emotional one, though, and it fully succeeded at that. It was a revenge fantasy flick with a heart: a satirical and strangely sensitive depiction of the awe and shame that all teens feel about their high school experience. Just when Heathers starts to seem like it's turning into a cartoonish, late-night stoner special, the murders begin. And then it gets dark... and awesome. Anyone who's been to a high school where they met their own 'Heathers' will feel alternately euphoric and disturbed about the events that follow. And that's what they should feel: it's a tale that's meant to make you reflect, and question your easy assumptions about the way 'everybody else' is. Even the "Heathers" in your life. It's a shame that Americans have stopped making films that really delve into the ugliest, funniest parts of being a teen the way that Heathers did. Subsequent generations of juniors could have really benefited from seeing more stuff like this. Teens generally have very few chances to really reflect upon their attitudes, and maybe even change them before setting off on a destructive (or self-destructive) warpath. Heathers gave me that chance and I was glad that I had it. Whatever your age, watch this film and you'll learn something that no school can ever teach you about being a teen... and have a laugh doing it.

Roger Ebert's 1988 review for Heathers prefaced his bewilderment at its corrosive social politics as feeling like "a traveller in an unknown country" – but for most audiences who have survived high school to follow, Heathers will feel all too much like coming home. Certainly, for those who normally take their high school comedies with a healthy helping of the Beach Boys or Zac Efron, the film will be a slap in the face, but still leave them thankful it wasn't a slap of Draino or an 'Ich Lüge' bullet. Still, almost 30 years down the line, with its original high school audience now old enough to have high schoolers of their own (oh God...), in a culture sadly more entrenched in teen suicide and school shootings than ever, Heathers remains as eerily prescient as ever. The mountain of shoulder pads, synths and perms may conjure a blast from the past, but a film this razor-sharp couldn't feel more scarily topical, so scathingly audacious you have to laugh, if only in incredulity.If you're one of the precious few who enjoyed high school congratulations. Heathers will make you pay for it. If you're one of the many who saw high school as a battleground, kill-or-be-killed Heathers will literalize that maxim to an uncomfortable extent, with a score of nervous titters to follow. Running by the seat of its pantsuit with snappy, uncompromisingly jet-black satire, the film is hazily shot with that airy synth soundtrack cultivating an air of heightened delirium, as if a gossamer dream, or someone about to keel over, blackout drunk. The disjuncture is appropriate, as Heathers' navigation of the border between sweet and sour in corrosive high school cliques is on point, a savage middle finger to the conventions of high school movies – even predecessor cautionary tales a-la Rebel Without a Cause and Carrie aren't safe from its scorn. The humour is less laugh-out-loud funny, more 'smirk and occasionally bray in incredulity because it's uncomfortably true,' with even many sheepish laughs turning into uncomfortably guilty reversals that pull the rug out from under you and leave you lying there, aching for those who have ever been jeered at by a bully, been the bully jeering, or worse: been one of the multitudes who stood by and did nothing to stop it. Protagonist Veronica's "Life Sucks!" platitude may start as a joke, but it doesn't stay one for long. But, M.A.S.H. be damned, suicide isn't painless. And it's here where Heathers, good conversation piece with its heart in the right place as it is, raises some eyebrows, and not always in the cheerfully controversy-baiting way that it wants. Let me preface this by saying that I strongly disagree that any text navigating the mine field of teen suicide, bullying, or attempted mass killings need tiptoe, its face a somber mask. Nonetheless, Heathers, trailblazing the debate, is almost too groundbreaking to make its points effectively, or ethically. The titular bullies, cartoon characters that they are, are almost too unforgettably quotable for their acidity not to soak into generations of wannabe popular kids too self-servingly cruel to get the satire (now doubly reinforced by a generation reared on Tina Fey's Mean Girls, which owes a massive debt to Heathers' snark, but pointedly inserted a hefty 'moral of the story' third act as a get- out-of-jail-free card, the likes of which are unseen here). Then there's Christian Slater's (aptly named) J.D. - a remix of Dean and baby-Nicholson too impossibly slick and cool not to cement his nihilistic ideology into the hearts of a disenfranchised generation... which gets problematic when his sliminess, subtle multiplicities of abuse, escalating serial killing, and cheerfully detailed attempt to bomb the school don't quite stick in our bad books the way they're meant to. Check the film's poster - a cutesy, wholesome, quirky romance for the whole family this ain't. It's a cruelly ironic and perplexingly glib outcome for a film that so intelligently unpacks the rationale of copycat suicides, particularly amidst the aforementioned epidemic of school shootings. But, as Veronica's blistering journal gradually comes to terms with, we - each individual one of us, and culture as a whole - are all ultimately more to blame than we'd ever like to be. Better come to terms with it. Life's very much worth living, but it still... sucks. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of Veronica's slide from toxic, abusive friend group to toxic, (differently) abusive relationship to taking agency of her own social standing is less attributable to the film's screenplay, and more chalked up to Winona Ryder's doggedly charismatic performance. Articulate, ballsy, unbearably cool and pungently endearing, Ryder is a rock of reason in a revolving maelstrom of nonsense (and if anything perfectly captures the essence of high school, it's this). Pair this with the triple-threat of Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands, and it's no wonder her 'eccentric cynic with a heart' archetype almost singularly carved out the voice (and middle finger) of Generation-X angst. Still, we should really talk about that monocle, though...Sauntering into the cultural unconsciousness like a snappy, hip, and truthful John Hughes movie stubbing out its cigarette on the school flag, Heathers' social politics may not always be quite as razor-sharp as its witticisms, but it's unquestionably more big-hearted than black hearted, even as the bodies hit the floor. Whether spawning spin off off-Broadway musicals, reminding viewers that pre-Mean Girls teen movies had teeth, or shocking generations anew with its funny, scary, omnipotence, Heathers' cultural power and presence continues to thwack us like a croquet ball to the collective forehead. In short, it's very... very.-8/10

Heathers is a decidedly unusual teen movie. While it covers some territory familiar to other films aimed at the same demographic, it does so in a manner that is less obvious and darker. It's essentially a black comedy about two types of malign influences that teenagers find themselves prone to, namely peer pressure from the popular and the appeal of the charismatic outsider. Both types of influence are shown here to have potentially horrendous consequences. Set in the American Midwest in and around a high school, there is a clique compromising of the four most popular girls in school. They are the (three) Heathers and Veronica; they revel in cruelty to those less fortunate than themselves. Things begin to change when Veronica develops a conscience and begins to see the Heathers for what they really are, a situation which is exacerbated by the influence of her new boyfriend, who has a psychotic side to him. Things are about to turn deadly.Heathers is an unusual film in that it doesn't lay out its intentions very clearly and it takes a bit of thought to try and work out the direction it is coming from. In many ways this is one of its strengths in that it is quite original and relatively unpredictable. It's probably also true that its content and tone don't always exactly match up, with the dark undercurrents being somewhat at odds with the pure comedy moments that compromise a large part of the proceedings. For the most part this weird combination essentially works, although I thought it did finally go off the rails by the final act which seemed out of place and a bit banal. Still, on the whole, it was an engagingly odd teen comedy which had the good grace to be actually laugh-out-loud funny on occasions such as the funeral with the football helmets, what a bottle of mineral water signifies in Ohio and a lot of funny dialogue sprinkled throughout. Much of the humour is of a dark kind though with much of it coming from the subject of teenage suicide and its aftermath. The film does explore this issue plus the different kinds of bad influences teenagers encounter very effectively. Also key to the success of the film is a winningly charismatic central performance from Wynona Ryder which helped propel her in to the front rank. Christian Slater also rose to prominence here with what is essentially a Jack Nicholson impersonation; it's a thoroughly punchable-face performance from start to finish. All-in-all, this unusual and somewhat transgressive teen comedy can fairly be considered a cult movie. Its combination of an appealingly colourful look, combined with smart comedy and dark undercurrents makes it one of the more interesting films of its type for sure.