Weekend At Bernie's

Larry (Andrew McCarthy) and Richard (Jonathan Silverman) are a couple of young white collar dudes who stumble upon a plot by someone to defraud the company they work for out of millions of dollars They report their findings to their boss, Bernie Lomax (Terry Kiser) who is, unbeknowst to them, doing the defrauding. Bernie invites them to his beach house for the weekend in order to have them whacked by his mob connections but the mob decide to whack Bernie instead and when Larry and Richard arrive for their dream weekend they find Bernie’s corpse. Not wanting to miss their weekend of hi-jinx, they decide to pretend that Bernie is still alive.

Weekend at Bernie's with its tacky wardrobe, flashy décor and life’s-a-party spirit is characteristically 80s (with a groovy little throwback to the 60s at Richard’s parent’s apartment). It is the kind of lightweight film that some people will love, others dismiss, depending largely on their mood. Yet despite being essentially a physiologically-impossible one-joke film, pound-for-pound it delivers more laughs than most mainstream comedies.

Whilst credit must go to Kotcheff, best known for the first Rambo movie, First Blood (1982), and Robert Klane for his blackly absurdist screenplay, if there is one aspect that brings the movie off it is Kiser’s turn as the dead man. Somehow he manages to be both physically responsive and inert simultaneously in a performance that is worthy of Jacques Tati.

 

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